#purple spindles

[seabeck]

Freaks

[milkweedman]

learning to spin on a drop spindle: a beginner’s lengthy yet comprehensive guide

I put this monograph together for a friend, but many other people wanted to read it as well, so here it is !

Fig A: Parts of a Drop Spindle. (image source. notes are mine. Click for higher res !). Apologies in advance for the lack of image descriptions--for the most part I use images because I can’t figure out how to describe the thing in words, so describing the images is kinda the whole issue. If anyone wanted to write them for me I’d add them to the original post in a heartbeat !

How to Get Started Drafting and Spinning

So, you have your fiber and your spindle--now what ?

Friendly pre-tutorial reminder that radfems can fuck right off if they think I’m writing any of this for their benefit. I’m not. I hope they all choke on their spindles <3. This is a safe space for trans people first and foremost.

(Check out this post that goes into picking a spindle and your first fiber, if you don’t have one yet)

First, you might wish to practice drafting a little. Drafting is the process of drawing the fibers out from, for example, a strand of roving or a rolag, into a thinner, airy length. To draft, loosely hold your fiber in your dominant hand, and pinch the very tip of the fiber with your thumb and forefinger of your non dominant hand. Then gently pull. If you pull all the way, you should notice that your fiber detaches from the fiber source eventually. For yarn, we want very very long lengths, so we don’t want that to happen. To get a continuous length of drafted fiber, simply change where you’re pulling from as you go. For example, you can draft out 2 centimeters/1 inch of fiber, and then move your fingers 2 cm/1 in back toward your fiber supply, and draft again.

The thinner you draft (or pre-draft*), the thinner that fiber will spin up. Once we start spinning, you’ll see how adding twist immediately compacts the fiber quite a bit, so you need to draft much thicker than you actually want your yarn to be. When pre-drafting specifically, if in doubt--draft thicker. You can always draft it out a little more as you’re spinning.

Figuring out how to draft smoothly can be one of the harder parts of learning to spin, but even before knowing how to do it perfectly you can still create good yarn.

Check out The Joy of Handspinning website to see drafting in action, as well as several different types of drafting.

Also check out this video explaining pre-drafting roving. 1:00-2:30 is especially helpful. If it’s not clicking from this video, search youtube for “pre drafting fiber for spinning” and watch til you have a better understanding.

*pre-drafting just means drafting before spinning--so it’s the same type of thing as drafting while spinning, but without having to wrangle your spindle at the same time. I’d recommend pre-drafting at least a bit of your fiber until you feel comfortable doing it. Then you can spin with your pre-drafted fiber, and it’ll be easier than if you hadn’t pre-drafted.

Tips: If you have a bottom whorl spindle, you may also want to practice spinning the spindle before it has any fiber on it, just to get a feel for how it moves. You could do this with the bottom point in a bowl or on a flat surface like a book or table. Try rolling the top of the shaft between your thumb and index finger. Don’t worry about it toppling over frequently--your spindle will be suspended by the yarn that you’re spinning, so it won’t topple !

If you have a top whorl spindle, you might have a harder time getting it to spin without being suspended, because the center of gravity is so high. Instead, try tying a piece of thread or scrap yarn to the hook (if it has one) or below the whorl (look for figure B below) and secure it with a half hitch knot. Then try spinning it like that, and let it hang freely to unwind itself whenever it has too much twist before you try again.

You can also try spinning a bottom whorl suspended by scrap yarn or thread. The advantage of trying it while it’s suspended is it can allow you to watch twist being added and see what it does without messing with your handspun, as well as letting you get a feel for how it moves while suspended. If you have a bottom whorl, I’d give both a try !

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Now that you can draft, you’re gonna want to attach your fiber to your spindle. Some people use a leader to do this--it’s a pre-spun loop of yarn that you tie to your spindle. Then you loop some pre-drafted fiber through the loop of the leader, add twist til it holds, and off you go.

Another way to do it is without a leader. I’m much more familiar with this method, and I find it way easier, so I’ll go into more depth on this one:

1. Take the end of your pre-drafted fiber (you will need enough pre-drafted fiber to go from the underside of the whorl to the very top of the spindle, and then back again. If you’ve pre-drafted way more, don’t worry. We’re just working with this short amount for now, but it can stay attached). Make a slip knot at the end. You can roll the fiber between your fingers to add some twist if you’re having trouble making a slip knot with it. (Tip: if you’re having trouble getting the fibers to roll, wet them slightly with water or spit and it will be much easier)

2. Put the slip knot on the bottom point of your spindle, and slide it up so that it’s at the whorl.

3. Gently wind the pre-drafted fiber up the spindle shaft, until you are at the hook or top. Wind it over the hook (or do a half-hitch knot at the top--if there’s a groove near the top your half hitch should sit in there, otherwise it should sit as close to the top as possible while still being secure. You may drop it a few times while learning where the perfect spot is--such is life). Be careful with pre-drafted fiber--depending on staple length and fiber type, it can pull apart quite easily. The trick to keeping that from happening is to keep it a little slack and loose until you have added twist to it.

4. Pinch your pre-drafted fiber between your thumb and forefinger on your dominant hand, about 1 hand’s width from the top of your spindle. Turn the spindle in the direction you intend to spin your yarn (usually this will be clockwise, or to the right). Spin the spindle until you have the desired amount of twist. You should notice that all the fiber above the hook/half-hitch has twist, while the fiber below it has none. You need all of it to have twist, so let’s even it out--pop the half-hitch off with your thumb/unwind the yarn from the hook, unwind the yarn from the shaft so that the entire length you’ve worked with so far is stretched out. This will allow the twist to equalize. Now wind it all back up and put the half-hitch back/wind around the hook again. You may need to repeat this a couple times to get your starting fiber fully twisted (don’t worry though--you only need to do this at the very start. From here on you shouldn’t need to equalize twist like that until the next time you start from an empty spindle).

You’re done attaching the fiber--now you can spin !

Fig B: How your yarn should sit on a spindle, both top and bottom whorl

If that doesn’t make sense, here’s a video showing how to attach it with and without a leader. If that doesn’t help either, search youtube for “how to attach leader to drop spindle” and keep looking until you have a better understanding.

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So you know how to draft and your fiber is attached to your spindle--now it’s time to spin ! There are 3 different parts to spinning a singles on a drop spindle.

1. Adding twist. This can be done with just your hands, but the spindle makes it a whole lot faster. This is the purpose of a spindle--to add twist very quickly (and as a bonus, it’s a handy place to store the yarn as you spin it !). All you have to do is spin the spindle, and the only trick is to make sure you always spin in a consistent direction--don’t start a project spinning clockwise and end it spinning counterclockwise ! You’ll have an impossible time plying it then. There are a lot of different ways to spin a spindle--you’ll see a few watching the videos here, and more if you search out videos of drop spindling yourself. Whatever method is comfortable and practical for you is what you should do.

2. Drafting the fiber. You already know how to do this part !

3. Winding the yarn on. When your yarn is long enough that adding more length will make it hard to work with, you’ll want to wind it onto the spindle so that you can get back to spinning. To do this, pop the half hitch knot off the top/unwind from the hook, unwind along the shaft, and wind it near or at the base of the whorl, in the orientation seen in the very first picture. Always wind in the same direction that you’re spinning, to stop your yarn from flying off.

I would highly recommend starting with the method known as “park and draft” while you learn. In this method, you first add a ton of extra twist (usually as much as you can) and then put the spindle down and draft until that extra twist is used up. Then you wind on, and repeat. This isolates the actions of spinning so that you are only doing one at a time, which makes it a lot easier. Most people move on from this technique once they’ve figured it out, but you don’t have to--the drawback is that it’s typically slower, but hey, spinning is a slow craft anyway. There is no wrong way to spin, and everyone’s hands and bodies have different needs and work in different ways.

How to Park And Draft

First, use your dominant hand to pinch your pre-drafted fiber a few inches/6 cm above the top of the spindle.

Now just spin the spindle clockwise, until it won’t really spin any more. (Don’t try to get ~the most twist ever achieved~ or anything like that--your yarn can potentially snap from too much twist. Take your cue from the spindle--when it stops wanting to spin, you’ve got enough twist.) Don’t let the twist advance beyond where you’re pinching it off.

This is important--if the twist gets into your fiber, it becomes much harder to draft it. But don’t worry, you can undo this by pinching just above where the twist has entered your fiber, and with the other hand just below (pinching the actual yarn here). Now (with the hand that’s pinching the yarn) roll in the opposite direction that you’re spinning in. This will move the twist down into the rest of your yarn. Let go of where you’re pinching the fiber, slide your yarn-pinching hand to where it usually is as you’re spinning, and get back to it.

Your leader/yarn should be very kinked up and wiry. Now put the spindle between your thighs (or between your knees, under one knee, or under something heavy that won’t damage your spindle. Thighs are convenient, but if it’s uncomfortable, try putting the spindle somewhere else. It needs to be held firmly in place and not move around). This is the “park” part of “park and draft”.

Now, you want to be pinching the twist off at the same spot, but using your other hand instead. I usually pinch right above where I’m already pinching and let go with the lower hand.

First we’re going to just bring the twist up the pre-drafted fiber by sliding your pinching hand up the fiber, slowly and gently. You should see the twist follow behind your hand as it enters the fiber. If you have lots of pre-drafted fiber, you might wind on, add more twist, wind on again, etc. You could also draft out your pre-drafted fiber (this is what the majority of more experienced spinners who pre-draft do) while you go.

The “draft” part of “park and draft” is just like pre-drafting, but one end is attached to a spindle. This gives you something to lightly pull against, if you want. Draft slowly and with purpose.

At a certain point, you will run out of excess twist. At this point, wind on. If you’ve only done a short length, you can also add more twist, park it again, and go back to drafting.

If you’ve run out of armspan but still have lots of excess twist, unpark your spindle (let it hang free) and allow it to untwist a little, monitoring it closely. If this happens often, try to put less energy into twisting your spindle, or allow it to twist for less time.

The amount of twist that your yarn has matters a lot--it will impact your finished yarn hugely. A yarn without enough twist will be very limp and might even fall apart as you handle it. A yarn with too much twist will be wiry and inelastic. You want to find a middle ground where it’s got just the right amount for what you intend to use it for--a hard, inelastic wool yarn can make a good bag, but not a very good hat.

To see how much twist you’ve added to your singles as you spin, try a plyback test ! This is really quick to do on spindles--just relax the distance between your fiber supply and the top of the spindle. When the yarn is no longer taut, the live twist will cause it to twist back on itself. With too little twist, you may just get a few sad loops (or no loops, if it’s super undertwisted). With too much twist, you may get tons of tight little curls of yarn. With a good amount of twist, you should have a few good curls (just one if it’s a short length of yarn, or several if it’s your armspan) that aren’t too tight. Those curls are what your yarn will look like once 2 plied, so it’s a great litmus test for whether you’re adding the correct amount of twist or not.

Fig C: What different amounts of twist looks like in your singles.

To fix too little twist, just spin the spindle a little extra until it looks right. To fix too much twist, either draft more fiber or else let the spindle untwist a little.

You can and should do this before winding each new length on, at least while you’re still learning the motions.

Check out this video of how to spin with the park and draft method ! 0:00-4:45 is intro and attaching the leader. 4:46-9:00 is the method itself (note to friend: don’t watch past 9 mins). If this video doesn’t work for you, search “drop spindle park and draft” on youtube.

A few interim tips

1. It’s critical to hold your fiber supply loosely. If you find that you have put a lot of force into drafting, then you are either holding your fiber way too tight or your hands are too close together (or potentially both). Drafting should not require force. If it is requiring force, adjust your grip and your hand placement continually until it gets better, and refine from there.

2. Try to put some tension on the yarn as you wind it on. This will make it sit a little neater and flatter, so that you have a more stable cone of yarn and can fit more on it.

3. If you draft out your fiber so much that it runs thin and just sort of disintegrates, just pull off the most wispy parts from your yarn and the fiber supply, then hold the two together again, making sure to overlap by several inches/6-10cm. Gently draft out a little and add twist before putting that join under the weight of your spindle, or it will fail again. You can join from one fiber source to the next one (necessary with rolags, hand combed top, and strips off of batts) in a similar way; make sure to leave a little unspun fiber for a good join, and overlap the end of the first fiber source with the beginning of the second by about an inch/2.5 cm.

4. If your yarn snaps (rather than your fiber running thin as you draft), it’s because it was A) twisted way too much B) spun too fine for the drop spindle you’re using C) both A and B or D) your spindle has become heavy enough that it can no longer spin as fine as you were spinning.

For A, B, and C: remove as much twist as you can from either end of the snapped yarn, then put both ends in your upturned palm, overlapping them over the whole width of your palm. Add enough either water or spit to get them good and wet (not dripping, but they do need to be wet). Now place your other palm down on top, and rub vigorously for about 30 seconds until the ends have joined together. If necessary, you can also just tie the ends in a knot, although it’s not invisible and you can usually feel it in the finished yarn.

For D: is your whorl removable ? If so, remove the whorl and continue spinning. If not (and for the vast majority of beginner’s drop spindles it won’t be), your spindle is full ! Even if there’s still room, it’s too heavy to continue spinning on for that project. You could keep going spinning a thicker yarn, but that means your yarn will randomly get thicker somewhere near the end, which works for very few projects. If this happens to you when there’s still tons and tons of room on your spindle, that means in general you ought to spin thicker yarn on that particular spindle if you want to fill it up all the way.

Okay, I spun yarn, now what ?

So at the moment, you have what we call a singles (some people just say “single”). That can be used as is, or it can be plied--that is, held together with more strands of singles and twisted in the opposite direction. But either way, you need to get it off your spindle !

If you’re going to leave it as a singles, then you’ll be winding it into a skein (we’ll get into that later). If you want to ply it though, you’ve got a lot of options. (I’ll get to how to actually ply later, this is just discussing those options.)

Many Methods of Plying

Plying Straight Off The Spindles

First, if you’ve got multiple spindles capable of spinning the same weight of yarn, you could just set your full spindle aside and spin another one. You’d need at least 3 spindles (the third, ideally, a bigger plying spindle) to get a 2 ply yarn, and 4 spindles to get a 3 ply with this sort of setup. This is what I do with supported spindles, since I have many, and I can attest that it saves a lot of winding time and is terribly convenient.

But it’s also probably not doable for many people, and it’s ridiculous to buy 3 drop spindles when you’re just getting into it !

Wind And Store

Second, you can wind your singles onto something for storage, and then use your now-empty spindle to spin another singles. Two great things to store yarn on are small rocks and empty toilet paper (loo) rolls.

Winding it around a small rock is better than just winding it into a ball for plying, since the rock will weight it and stop it from flying up in the air once you start plying. A big pebble works great. With this setup, you’d want to put all your balls of singles in a bowl or container of some kind, hold the ends of each, attach it to your spindle, and let them roll around as you ply.

They can tangle (mine usually don’t, but it can happen), so the toilet paper rolls might be an upgrade--these can be put on a stick, and the stick can be put on something (or you can poke two holes in a cardboard box, put the stick through one hole, load the rolls onto it, then put it through the other hole as well) to keep it stationary so that the rolls... well, roll. This requires some storage space (usually if you do this often, you don’t wanna make a new one every time, so keeping it is preferable) and is honestly not a huge upgrade... unless you have a ball winder that can wind the yarn onto the TP rolls for you, in which case this is a big time saver. If you don’t have one and don’t have issues with tangling, the rocks will probably work just as well and take up a lot less space.

Fig D: Diagram of a Simple Ply Box

Ply Bracelet

Thirdly, if you want a 2 ply yarn specifically, you could wind it onto your hand and make something called an Andean Plying Bracelet. Here’s a link to a page that goes into it in detail. I highly, highly recommend learning how to do these. They look a little complex, and I couldn’t tell you the motions if my life depended on it, but I can do them with my eyes closed while not paying a whit of attention. They rely entirely on muscle memory, so once you learn them, they’re easy as pie.

The whole point of a plying bracelet is to get 2 strands of yarn out of 1 singles. You could of course wind a singles into a ball, then wind half of it onto another ball, and then ply from there. But a plying bracelet is a lot faster, and will always match up exactly.

One downside of a plying bracelet is that, as the name implies, it goes on your wrist. So if you keep needing to put your spindle down to take care of other things, you’ll need to pull off the plying bracelet as well (or carry the whole thing with you). They can be stored on a cylindrical object that’s smaller than your wrist, or sometimes also draped on hooks or put on the spindle shaft itself. I don’t usually encounter problems when pulling on or off my plying bracelets--it doesn’t seem to tangle them--but if you’re plying while cooking or watching a child or something else that might require you to stop immediately and hurry over to whatever needs tending, then you might want to save the ply bracelet for another day.

Chain Plying

Fourth, you could wind your singles into one ball, and then chain ply it. Chain plying is a way to turn one singles into a 3 plied yarn. It also preserves stripes in your singles (we’ll talk about this in more detail later), so it can be perfect for a very colorful singles.

Chain plying is simple. Do you know how to tie a slip knot ? Of course, because you needed one to start spinning ! (Although here’s the link to how to tie a slip knot again, if you need it.) So that means you basically know how to chain ply as well.

Step one: tie a slip knot at the end of your singles (you want a very short tail, since that’s basically waste). Make the resulting loop nice and big, and lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through the loop--now you have a new loop ! Make it nice and big as well. Lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through.  Repeat until you’re at the end of your singles (try to have your last loop be a very small one). To finish, place the end through the loop, and then just pull on it until it tightens the loop. Note that you typically are adding ply twist and winding on as you do this, but you can also just chain ply an entire single and wind it into a ball as you go, then add twist once you’re done. That can be a lot easier to wrangle, if you’re having difficulties.

You might notice that this is basically a really open crochet chain. Yep ! It needs to be open so that the twist can enter the yarn, but you can do very big or somewhat smaller loops--although no matter what, you need to keep the loops large enough to at least hook a couple fingers through them so that you can make the next loop. Note that sometimes, the bump at the start of each loop can be felt and/or seen. Also note that chain plying is best done with smooth singles that can slide against each other. It can be done with a bumpy, lumpy yarn that sticks to itself, but bumps and lumps will catch as you try to chain, and if the yarn sticks to itself then it won’t slide nicely, which can really slow you down.

You may find that you prefer holding the ball of singles as you chain, or you may want it in a container on your lap/on the floor. You could also make a little wrist pouch to hold it, although take friction into account--if you make it out of wool yarn, choose a smooth one.

Ply Ball

Fifth is a sort of hybrid of a few of the others I’ve already mentioned, called a ply ball. To make a ply ball, simply wind two or more singles together into a ball (I’d suggest winding them around a small rock for a ply ball, too). The number of singles you wind in your ply ball will be the number of plies your yarn will have. A chain plied single wound into a ball is also functionally a ply ball.

Ply balls are extremely portable--you only ever need to work with one at a time, so you can just keep it in your pocket without worry of tangling, and it’s not attached to you or a box or another spindle. The downside is that it generally requires you to either have multiple spindles (ex: fill up two spindles, wind both off into one ply ball) or do extra winding (ex: fill up your spindle, wind it off to a rock for storage, fill up your spindle again, now wind from the spindle and the rock to get your ply ball. Add more winding for more plies).

However, you can also wind a ply ball from plying bracelet (yes, that’s more winding--but now it’s portable, and you’ve just turned one singles into a 2 strand ply ball) or even chain a singles, but wind it into a ply ball instead of plying it then and there to get a 3 strand ply ball (this also might let you play around with really long or really short chains without having to think about ergonomics as much, since your spindle isn’t involved).

Ply balls can also be helpful if you’re having issues wrangling your singles while you try to ply, since they’re laid together already--so they’re worth an attempt if you are having trouble keeping your yarn in line while plying.

There’s a short (but full of tips) article on ply balls here.

There’s even more ways to ply--look into "plying from a center pull ball” (similar to a plying bracelet, but requires a ball winder or a nostepinne) and “ply on the fly” (chain plying at the same time as spinning the singles--highly portable instant gratification). There may also be others that I’ve forgotten or not heard of, hopefully mentioned by others in the notes !

So Many Ways to Ply--How to Choose ?

So, every plying method and every number of plies has its own effects on the finished yarn, and you can use those effects to get the yarn you’re after.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with yarn weights such as lace weight and worsted weight, you should read this first !

A singles is great for your soft, fluffy, luxury stuff--cowls, hats, mittens that won't get a lot of wear, or shawls. It also preserves the colors that you spun exactly--so if you spun a beautiful perfect rainbow singles and the most important thing to you is that it stays a rainbow, you could leave it as a singles ! You can knit, crochet, weave, and nalbind with them like normal (I actually really prefer them for nalbinding--they felt easier so the joining is quicker), although because they haven’t been plied, they’re a lot weaker to abrasion and snapping. So they’re not ideal for things that need to be durable, and if you’re spinning short and/or fine fibers, you may find that even with some care they still don’t last very long, so keep in mind that stuff made from singles probably won’t be passed down or anything like that. But still, I’ve knit several small pouches from singles that have held up just fine being tossed around my room. One advantage to note is that you have the most yardage and the least spinning time this way, so it’s a very ‘time cheap’ yarn--you spin 100 yards/90 meters of singles, and you get 100 yards/90 meters of yarn. No time spent plying. However, it is as thin or thick as you spun it, and however consistent or inconsistent your spinning is, that’s your end result ! A lot of spinners (me) balk at this.

2 ply is next. I use 2 ply for almost everything besides socks--it’s quick, it’s fairly durable, and it looks very pretty (and an error correction: is ideal for lace). A 2 ply halves the amount of yarn you end up with--if you spin 100 yards/90 meters and 2 ply it, you’ll end up with 50 yards/45 meters. It also has a distinct ‘handspun’ look--2 ply knits up to a messier fabric. I really love that effect, but if you want a neat, uniform fabric, don’t do a 2 ply ! I’m not sure how it affects crochet or weaving, unfortunately, but do I suspect it’s similar with crochet. It also bulks up your yarn--it’ll be a little bit less than double the thickness of your singles, usually. 2 ply holds up alright to gentle/moderate daily wear, and is great for hats, gloves that don’t need to be hard wearing, scarves, and bags that won’t need to bear a huge amount of weight. It’s a workhorse yarn--you can use it for almost anything, and it’ll probably be okay. The only thing I would never use it for is socks--that’s a 3 or 4 ply project.

Let’s talk 3 ply ! 3 ply can be achieved either through chain plying or else as a traditional 3 ply--meaning 3 separate singles all plied together. You’ll get very different effects from these two methods in terms of both color and even-ness. If your singles had any stripes of color, with chain ply they will remain as stripes (this could be an alternative to your rainbow singles !). With a traditional 3 ply, your stripes will all blur together, and you’ll get a varied and multicolored yarn. You will get 1/3 of the yardage/meterage of your original singles, so a 3 ply yarn takes longer to make than a singles or a 2 ply. But it is also about 3 times thicker than your singles, so if you’re struggling to spin thick singles but want a thick yarn, 3 ply is a great option.

If your singles are very even, you’ll see no real different between chain ply and traditional 3 ply (except for the bumps at the start of each loop--they are usually visible as well). However, if your singles are kind of all over the place, chain plying magnifies this. On the other hand, a traditional 3 ply really evens out any inconsistencies. Even though I’ve got a few years under my belt, I am not a very consistent spinner, simply because I can neither visualize nor remember the weight I ought to be spinning, so it’s always a total guess (damn aphantasia). Beginners are also often inconsistent spinners, just due to lack of muscle memory. Either way, a traditional 3 ply can be really helpful in creating a fairly smooth, even yarn from really wild, inconsistent singles.

Fig E: comparisons of chain ply and traditional 3 ply, in terms of consistency

Lastly, 4 ply. 4 ply will turn your heavy laceweight singles into a light worsted, if it puffs up in blocking enough. I love 4 ply for my supported spindles mostly, since those spin very fine yarn and I don’t have a use for anything finer than sock weight yarn. It’s also very durable, and a laid 4 ply (like a traditional 3 ply--just 4 strands held together) make good socks. A cabled 4 ply (take two 2 ply yarns and ply them again) makes terrible socks, but is still very durable and has an interesting rope like appearance and texture. 4 ply in general is great for socks, bags, blankets, and especially sweaters, as it doesn’t pill much and will stand up to heavy wear. However, you have to spin 4 times the singles to get your finished yarn--a 100 yard/90 meter 4 ply skein requires 400 yards/360 meters of singles, and then more time for plying. So these are rather slow. They’re an awesome option for a fiber that refuses to spin up to anything other than the finest lace, and they will make great objects and garments that will last for a good long while.

Past 4 ply, you kind of just get rope. I haven’t ventured past 4 ply much--give it a shot if you’re curious !

The Why of Ply is a great article on the different aspects of different plies, and touches on some stuff I don’t mention (like stitch definition and cables) if you want to know more ! Highly recommend it.

How to Ply

So... you know at least a few methods of plying now, know how many plies you want your finished yarn to have, and you may have even already wound a ply ball or filled all of your spindles. Which means it’s finally time to ply everything.

To start, you need to attach all your plies to your spindle. For the methods that I’ve discussed (with the exception of chain plying), you’re going to do the following: gather the ends of your plies together, and make one slipknot with all of them. Then put the slipknot on your spindle below the whorl, the same way you would when spinning singles (and when not using a leader).

For chain plying: chain your singles until you’ve got about a foot or a third of a meter. Now you want to attach it to your spindle. Take the very first slip knot loop and slip it onto the spindle, below the whorl.

Now, secure your yarn by wrapping it around the hook or else with a half hitch knot, and spin the spindle counterclockwise (anticlockwise). You should immediately see the plies twisting together to form plied yarn.

From here, you will proceed basically the same way as you did when spinning singles--you’ll add twist to your plies, then wind on. This can be a really great opportunity to practice doing things while the spindle is in motion; you won’t be drafting, but depending on the type of plying you’re doing, you may be chaining, pulling from a ply bracelet, or simply letting the plies slide through your fingers (you do want to tension them and keep the twist from getting past your hand). If that requires too much coordination, feel free to park and ply--that is, spin the spindle to add excess twist, park it and let it into your yarn, then wind on.

If you try to ply your yarn the same direction that you spun it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really turn into a cohesive yarn, and instead becomes wiry and the plies don’t slot neatly together. If you notice this happening, turn your spindle in the other direction. A yarn that is both spun and plied in the same direction won’t be stable or strong, and will tangle the second you try to work with it.

This is why it’s helpful to be consistent in which direction you choose to spin your singles, by the way--if you always spin wool clockwise, then you can know with certainty that it will be plied counterclockwise.

We refer to yarn as having either Z twist or S twist (this refers to whatever the finished twist is, so a singles that you’re never going to ply, or a 3 ply yarn, for example). This just makes it a little easier to talk about and recognize what we’re doing.

Fig F: S and Z Twist in plied and singles yarn

It’s essentially a mnemonic device that allows you to glance at your yarn and go “Oh! I spun these three singles counterclockwise, so I should ply them all together clockwise.” I often have to draw an S or Z in the air (just like I sometimes have to draw an L in the air to pretend I can reliably tell left from right), but it is pretty foolproof and will prevent you from, for example, trying to ply an S twist singles with a Z twist singles and then wondering what on earth went wrong.

By the way, this page has a really helpful chart on what direction you might want to spin in based on what you intend to do with the finished yarn. For example, crocheting (right handed style) with S twisted yarn will remove the twist as you work, but knitting in continental or English style (or crocheting left handed style) with that same yarn will add twist. Most spinners spin their singles to have Z twist and ply them with S twist--but if you’re a crocheter or knit Eastern style this will unply your yarn as you work, and you are encouraged to try reversing things to have better results with your handspun projects. The more you know !

Now, back to your plying. You may be wondering how you’re supposed to know how much ply twist to add, which is a great question, because plyback tests don’t work when you’re actually plying. Those are for when you’re spinning your singles. Instead, I do what I call a “hanging test”. Just hold out a length of plied yarn between your hands and let it hang (not pulling it taut--the yarn should have a nice downturned curve). A balanced yarn--that is, a yarn that has equal and correct amounts of spin and ply twist--will just hang nicely. An underplied (or underspun) yarn will usually also hang nicely, but you will see gaps inbetween the plies. This is no good at all. Gaps won’t just make your yarn look bad, they'll also make it split when you work with it, and will be less durable and more prone to pilling, felting, and eventual disintegration after much use.

On the other end of the spectrum, an overplied yarn (which may have both too much spin and ply twist, or may be underspun and then overplied in an attempt to fix ones mistake--which won’t work, by the way. You need to go back and add more spin twist to your singles) will twist in the middle instead of hanging. If it only twists a tiny bit, you’re fine. But if it twists a lot, there’s problems. Overtwisted 2 ply yarns tend to be aggressively smooth--this is only relevant for 2 ply, since those have a sort of pearled silhouette. If your 2 ply is smooth, then you’ve most certainly overplied it. 3 and 4 ply are always smooth, however, so a smooth profile for one of those is to be expected.

Fig G: Ply twist in 2 ply yarns. Do these yarns have S or Z twist ?

Don’t worry if your first yarns aren’t perfectly spun or plied (really--they won’t be). Every spinner is striving for something different with their yarn. Some are aiming for total technical perfection, some aim for exquisite fineness, some aim for beautiful colorways and for finding the softest and most lovely breed of sheep. Some just want to spin, some just want usable yarn, some just want a pair of socks that last on their feet and find commercial sock yarn to be about as durable as wet paper (that would be me). You certainly don’t have to know what you want to get out of spinning right away, but the point is that every single spinner has their own standards that they hold themself to, and you don’t need to (and shouldn’t !) try to meet others standards. Especially when still learning, but also just all the time and forever.

I’ve Plied My Yarn, Now What ? OR I Just Want Singles, Now What ?

Now your yarn needs to come off the spindle ! But not the way we’ve been taking singles to ply off the spindle--we need to make what’s called a hank. A hank is basically a loop of yarn that’s been tied so that it’s nice and secure. These loops can be pretty big (mine are all 2 yards/1.8 meters) or as small as the distance around your hand--it all comes down to what you wind your yarn onto.

I have already made a tutorial that goes into quite a bit of depth (and has pictures, even), so I’m gonna speed through this part a little bit.

1. Find something to wind your yarn around. A Niddy noddy is the preferred tool for the job here, and will make it much faster to wind and thoughtlessly simple to calculate the yardage/meterage of your yarn (I’ve seen people use yarn swifts as well, and they certainly look very speedy), but they are by no means required. Substitutes include: a large hardcover book, the back of one or two chairs, your hand (ideal for very small amounts of yarn), your forearm (for smallish amounts of yarn--wrap between the thumb and forefinger and go down to the elbow, then back up), or anything else that won’t deform with pressure and is holding relatively still.

2. Wind your yarn around that thing. You may need to start with a slipknot to attach it to whatever it is you’re winding on, or else a piece of tape. If you’re using your forearm or hand, you can simply pinch the end to hold it in place. Unlike when winding your yarn onto your spindle, when winding your yarn into a hank, you want to use as little tension as possible so that you can get a more accurate measurement of length later on. Also try to keep your winding tidy--in an ideal world, the yarn should be traveling almost the same path every time, not a few inches to the left one time, then wildly skewed to the right the next time.

3. Tie off your hank. Once you’ve finished winding, you need to secure your hank so that it doesn’t tangle. You can use either scrap yarn or else the ends of the yarn you just made (I prefer the latter, since the ends tend not to be very good anyway, so at least they don’t go to waste. In this case, snap off or cut both ends--the length you should cut depends on how thick your hank is). Find where both ends are--you will need to tie knots near the ends so that you can attach the ends to them. Tie an overhand knot a few inches/5cm below the first end, and then hold that end alongside one of your strands of knot-tying yarn, and tie another overhand knot. Repeat this with the other end. Make sure you haven’t overlooked any strands of yarn and left them out of the tie--that’s a very easy way to get tangles.

4. Remove your hank. Gently push your hank off of whatever you wound it on. Put it to the side--now we want to measure. Use soft measuring tape (or a piece of inelastic string or yarn, if you don’t have one--you will then need to measure that against a rigid measuring tape) to span the entire path that your yarn traveled. Write down that number, and now count the number of strands in your hank. Multiply the two numbers together. Now convert your inches or centimeters into yards or meters, and you have your yardage or meterage !

Ex: You wrapped your yarn around your palm, which measures 10 inches. There are 41 strands. 10x41=410. 410 inches is roughly 11 yards. Or: You wrapped your yarn around a small book, which measured 21 cm. There are 50 strands. 21x50=1050. 1050 cm is of course 10.5 meters.

Fig H: Winding a hank on a hardcover book.

It can be very helpful to label your handspun yarn. The yardage/meterage is critical information when it comes to using patterns, less so if you don’t use patterns. But there’s other info that you might still find handy to know later on, such as what the fiber is, where and when you got it, when you spun it, how you plied it, any info on the dye job, what the yarn weight is, what spindle you spun it on, whether it is part of a set, how much it weighs, etc.

Some of my really verbose labels might look like this: Avocado dye and copper mordant hand dyed in the fleece 2020 Cormo Bought 2019 Spun for 2020 TDF 2 plied on wheel 210 yards 3.4 oz light worsted weight

But most of my labels just have the yardage and breed, if I label them at all. I tend to document things online and also remember spinning my yarn better than I remember anything else going on in my life, so I’m a little lazy about labeling. Your labels should include the information that you think you’ll find helpful in the future, or that you know you won’t have another way to recover if you end up forgetting.

Blocking your yarn

Don’t attach that label just yet--we aren’t totally done with our yarn. It has one or two more steps before it’s ready to be used, and that first step is called blocking. There’s a few ways to block yarn--wet blocking, steam blocking, and resting.

Wet blocking: Get your hank of yarn wet, using anything other than very hot water (this could start felting your yarn). You could run it under the tap for a minute or else let it sit in a bowl of water with a little hair conditioner for about half an hour, if you wanted your yarn to be a little softer, then rinse the yarn. Squeeze as much water out as you can, then hang it to dry. You can (and should) also snap or thwack it--but I've gone into detail on that in a link below.

Steam blocking: Get a source of steam going--like a pot of water simmering or a very hot tap running. Using tongs or a long wooden spoon, hold your yarn over the steam and slowly rotate it until the whole skein has been steamed. Don’t let the yarn touch the water.

Resting: If neither option above is possible, you can also just let your yarn sit for at least a week. This lets the twist settle down, so it’ll be a lot easier to work with. However, it doesn’t do anything else that blocking does, so it won’t really show you your “finished” yarn, and may lead to problems down the road.

So--why did we just do that stuff ? Well, we blocked our yarn to reset the fibers, basically. During the spinning, we put the fibers under tension, and they more or less stay in that slightly stretched state. But it’s not really stable--the next time they get wet, they’ll spring back into the natural crimp that the wool wants to have (this changes drastically depending on breed and even individual sheep), and will often puff up. The hank might lose a little length and your yarn’s weight (not as in ounces or grams, but as in lace, dk, or bulky weight) often increases some. So if you’ve made your yarn into something before blocking it, with the perfect gauge and nice drape, the first time you wash it you’ll find that it’s thicker and a little smaller and has less drape. It might not fit anymore, or the seams might be messed up.

This is all entirely avoidable if you just block it before you do anything with it, so I highly recommend that you do.

The other thing that blocking does is set the twist, so your yarn won’t kink up as you work with it--even a perfect, balanced yarn can kink up as you work if the twist is live--which makes it a lot more pleasant. Resting sets the twist as well, as mentioned above.

I’ve gone into blocking in more detail in this post here, if you’d like to know more--I’d especially recommend reading the last section about snapping and thwacking your yarn.

Once it’s fully dry (and remember--wool can hold a lot of water and still feel dry, so give it a little extra drying time just to be sure) it only needs to be wound into a ball before you can use it ! Congratulations on your handspun yarn--that’s a real achievement.

Storing your yarn

If you don’t plan on using it right away, you may want to skein your hanks up to keep them compact and tidy. To do this, put your thumbs on the inside of your hank, and pull it taut. Then, one thumb at a time, twist in the opposite direction that you plied in. Your hank should start to kind of look like rope. Once it has a lot of twist (enough that you’re struggling to add more), find the center point of the hank, and fold it. With 2 yard hanks I tend to fold it over my knee, but a doorknob or something else would work just as well. It should immediately look like an oversized piece of yarn--that’s because we just twisted it one direction, and then folded it in two and let the excess twist twist it in the other direction, which is the same way you ply yarn ! There should be a loop at each end where your thumb was--take your thumbs out and put one loop through the other. Now you can attach your label and you’re good to go !

If it’s a very small hank (one that’s been wound around the palm, especially) you’ll probably just want to wind it into a ball instead. You could do this with any length of yarn--it’s not an ideal way to store wool yarn ultra long term, since staying wound into a ball can stretch out the fibers again, which means you’d need to wind it into a hank and re-block it if you wanted to make an accurate gauge swatch or something. Short term (a year or less) it’s just fine.

If you’re wondering how to wind up a big hank into a ball without tangling, just sit down with your knees up, and put your knees inside the hank, then move your knees apart until the hank is taut. Now you can wind in relative peace, free from tangles. You can also use a yarn swift, if you’ve got one.

I would recommend, by the way, using up some of your first skeins as soon as possible (you might want to keep your very first skein so that later you can see how far you’ve come--I really wish I kept mine). You won’t know how your spinning is until you’ve used it, so to prevent you from getting to skein #40 thinking you’ve been doing great, only to discover that your yarn is actually unusable... use your early yarn ! Evaluate it, make judgements, and learn from it. Does it need more twist ? Is it very lumpy ? Are there lots of spots where it went thin ? Do you like how the colors turned out with the plying method you chose ? These are all good questions to ask yourself as you use your yarn.

Moving On From Park and Draft

Once you’re comfortable with the park and draft method, you might want to try moving on to true suspended spinning. As I said earlier--it may not be for you, and that’s fine, but you won’t know if you don’t try. True suspended is quite a bit faster than park and draft, so if you want to speed up a little, you should give it a shot.

In park and draft, you first add twist, then park the spindle to draft your fibers into yarn. In true suspended spinning, you set the spindle going and draft while the twist is being added. This eliminates the whole ‘standing/sitting there with your arm outstretched, waiting for your yarn to accumulate twist’ section.

The easiest way to get into true suspended spinning is to work your way up to it--try drafting just a little bit while your spindle is building up twist during park and draft. To give yourself more time, set the spindle spinning slower. Then try drafting a bit more. The goal is to draft at the same rate that twist is added, meaning that you can wind on pretty much as soon as the yarn is too long to keep spinning.

The trick here is to adjust the speed at which your spindle spins rather than the speed at which you draft. You can only draft so fast before your technique gets sloppy, and past that you’ll be focused far more on keeping pace with the twist being added than on drafting evenly.

So if I find that I spun my spindle too aggressively, I still it immediately and try again, but slower this time.

I answered an ask about this a while ago where I went into a little bit more depth, if you’re interested.

And if you haven’t seen it, the pinned post on my blog is a lot of stuff like that all collected into one post for easier perusal. Some of them I’ve already linked to earlier in this post, but others I haven’t.

Small Projects, Scrap Projects, and Big Projects: Tips for All

You may be wondering, What the hell am I supposed to do with this yarn ? This isn’t even enough for a pair of fingerless gloves !

Which is a fair concern--endlessly accumulating small skeins of yarn can be frustrating if you don’t know how to use them up.

Drop spindles are limited in how much yarn you can make on them, and while you can make huge skeins by joining smaller skeins together, they may not all be the same weight ! Or they may not match. Or it may just be really boring.

You may also be doing a lot of experimenting, and ending up with 30 yard/meter skeins that you can’t even make something tiny with.

Small Skeins: For single skeins that are too small for gloves, hats, etc, you may still be able to make things like pouches (for yarn, crochet hooks, dice, coins, etc), baby socks or hats, coasters, or other small items. My spinning wheel oil holder is a little basket crocheted out of some handspun, and I have a mini tape measurer on my keys with a cover crocheted over it from handspun as well. You might have to invent things to do with your handspun, but using items that you made enriches your life--I promise.

Scrap Projects: What about tiny skeins ? Or maybe you’ve already made all the coasters and baby socks and spinning oil holders that you could possibly need, and now the small skeins are piling up again. I humbly submit the Scrap Yarn Project--my favorite type of project by far. I’ve been slowly working on a handspun scrap blanket for about 2.5 years, using tiny scraps, small skeins, and leftovers from projects alike. I knit 5x5 inch stockinette squares (some have colorwork, some have different stitch patterns, but mostly I let the yarn be the star) and for the most part just try make squares that are thick enough to stay warm but thin enough to have a little drape. It’s an incredibly satisfying project.

Fig I: An older image of the author’s handspun scrap blanket in progress. The yarns used range from fingering weight to super bulky, and are spun in all sorts of different ways. But it still feels very cohesive.

I like the square approach (and of course if you wanted to crochet granny squares, that would work perfectly too) because it’s modular, so you can decide halfway through that you don’t want a sweater, you want a bag--and then just sew the squares into a bag, instead. But it doesn’t need to be squares by any means--you could also make scrap yarn sweaters, hats, socks, scarves, etc., that are constructed normally.

The only thing to look out for is yarn weight--in some cases, you might want the weights to all be very similar. Socks, for instance, won’t do well if you have parts that are bulky weight and parts that are light fingering weight. You could hold yarns together to get similar weights if necessary, or just only add to the project when you’ve got another scrap skein of worsted weight or whatever. For squares you can use any weight of yarn if you want, but you should change your hook or needle size to get a fabric that’s a similar density, so your stitch count will change from square to square.

Big Projects: These can be difficult even for experienced spinners, because consistency is key to ending up with an even fabric. Not from armspan of yarn to armspan, but from skein to skein--if the weight changes, things can suddenly get much more complicated while you try to correct for the skeins that are too thick or too thin.

One way to try and mitigate that is to not ply anything until you’ve finished spinning all the singles--that is, if you need 10 skeins of 2 ply, spin 20 spindles worth, then go through and pair off your stored singles, thin with thick and average with average. It can definitely be more tedious to do it this way, but if you’re worried about consistency, it might be a good idea.

It also might not be necessary. Try to let your mind stretch back over the whole course of human history--as a species, we’ve been spinning yarns for pretty much all of it, and until very recently, what you spun was what clothed you. If the skeins you spun for your new cloak were all different weights, well... you probably either repurposed those skeins (IF you could, and that’s a pretty sketchy IF) or you shrugged, wore a lumpy cloak, and got on with life. Perfection isn’t everything, my friend. Either way, do what’s going to make you happy. For me, I’d be just fine with a lumpy cloak.

Out Of The Basics: A Few Further Pushes Into The World of Spinning

There’s many, many techniques out there, and an infinite variety of yarns to be spun. Some require tools, some don’t. Some are very advanced, and some quite simple. There are many other tools to spin on besides drop spindles. There’s also processes related to spinning--such as dyeing, fiber prepping, and wool washing--which can greatly enhance your spinning enjoyment and variety. I can’t teach them to you today, but I can certainly tell you about them so that you can look into them yourself !

Changing Up Your Fiber or Techniques to Get Different Effects

We touched on this earlier in the section about the number of plies--a 2 ply yarn will knit up into a bumpy, slightly irregular fabric, and a 3 or 4 ply will be very regular and neat. But that’s not the extent of what you can do to change your yarn up (without buying anything new). I’m going to throw some terms around now--you’ll need to google them, because this is already absurdly long.

For one thing, if you have roving, you can try splitting it lengthwise and fractal plying your yarn for a very beautiful self-striping but marled effect. You can also try spinning it from the fold on multicolored roving, which keeps the colors separate instead of muddied, which can happen otherwise.

With any fiber, you can always mix and match, or add pops of color ! If you’re spinning a bunch of gray rolags, for instance, you can occasionally detach the rolag, spin a tiny bit of blue roving, reattach the rolag, and go back to spinning. Depending on how you ply it, this could produce almost specks of blue or else slips and streaks.

Speaking of plying, the way you make a 2 ply can really change the colorway of the yarn if your fiber is a gradient or multicolored. Say you’ve got roving that’s a gradient from white to purple--if you do a plying bracelet, your yarn will be part barberpole, part gradient: a purple ply with a white ply at one end, and then gradually transition to the midpoint of lavender-pink in the middle, with both plies the same color. But if you plied it the other way, by wrapping your singles onto storage rocks and then plying from those, you’d get a yarn that’s got one pink ply and one white ply at one end, and one pink ply and purple ply at the other.

Chained 3 ply versus traditional 3 ply will make a huge difference as well. If your fiber has stripes, chain plying it will preserve them perfectly (as long as you’re careful to start a loop at the color change--or if you wanted it to fade in a little, you could start partway through a color change), whereas a traditional 3 ply will always marl them, no matter how careful you are about evenly splitting your fiber into 3 sections.

If you like really colorful and bright yarns, you might enjoy cabled 4 ply (where you ply two 2 plied yarns together). If your starting 2 plies are already colorful, you’ll get super colorful yarn with a cabled 4 ply--to me it always looks like dashed lines in different colors.

A laid 4 ply can also make some interesting color combinations, and is perhaps the ideal candidate for mixing random singles together, since it has 3 other plies each singles can hopefully be tempered by. And a yarn that has 3 plies of one color and 1 ply of another color can be interesting indeed !

It’s not just color that you makes an exciting new yarn, though--you can also try making boucle, or thread plying or autowrapping, or spinning beehives, spinning beads into your yarn, spinning thick and thin yarn... the possibilities are almost endless. I’d highly recommend giving “The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs” by Sarah Anderson a read if you can--she discusses all of these and many more, and shows how to do them. Other good books that’ll show you how to make lots of different kinds of yarn, or how to tailor your yarn to your needs, are: “Yarnitecture”, by Jillian Moreno, “Spin Art” by Jacey Boggs, and “Yarn Spinning With A Modern Twist”, by Vanessa Kroening. Your library may well have copies, and if not you could likely request they buy it.

You Don’t Have to Drop Your Spindles

...Because there’s other kinds of spindles ! And things that aren’t spindles, but on which you can also spin !

There are Turkish Spindles, which are functionally almost identical to drop spindles (and you can drop them, to be fair), but you wrap your yarn around two detachable interlocked arms that also function as the whorl. When you remove the arms and spindle shaft from the turtle (not cone) of singles, you can then 2 ply with it immediately using both ends. Turkish spindles are great if you love 2 ply and hate winding.

There are Supported Spindles, which come in many forms but are essentially fancy sticks with pointy tips that you spin in bowls. These have more winding than drop spindles because you spin in very short lengths at a time and wind onto a temporary cop that’s just below the tip (it’s much faster than if you wound all the way down to the cop near the bottom). However, you use them while sitting or even (with a bit of wrangling) laying down, and your arms stay in a comfortable, much more relaxed position while spinning. It also spins, as a default, finer yarn than your average drop spindle (I can achieve a very fine and consistent laceweight on any supported spindle, but have only managed that on my tiniest and lightest drop spindle). And they are very fast tools--with proficiency, they can be much faster than drop spindles. Supported spindles are great if you find drop spindles painful, if you have low energy, if you’re mobility impaired, or if you want to spin finer yarn.

There are Spinning Wheels, which come in many shapes and sizes but are the fastest way to make yarn by hand. There are a few objects which could fall under the umbrella of a spinning wheel (namely Walking Wheels, Charkah Wheels, and Electric Wheels) which do not have treadles, but the majority of spinning wheels are powered by foot treadles and can spin faster than you can spin a drop spindle. They also remove winding from your list of duties (for the most part), since the flyer will wrap your newly spun yarn onto the bobbin as you go. New spinning wheels can be prohibitively expensive, but you can also find used ones for ludicrously cheap on craigslist, at estate or garage sales, at antique shops, or other places where old items might be sold. (You can also often find them at affordable but not cheap prices at fiber festivals). Be sure to research the parts of a spinning wheel before you try to buy a used one from a non-spinner--there are many SWSO’s (Spinning Wheel Shaped Objects) out there that will fool you. Spinning wheels are great if you want to make larger amounts of yarn, or want to make yarn faster.

There are Electric Wheels, which are small machines that will add twist and wind the yarn onto the bobbin for you, so all you have to do is draft. New low end models are much cheaper than new spinning wheels, and they take up far less space. They also remove the element of treadling, so if you are intrigued by spinning wheels but have weak legs in any capacity, these can save you a lot of pain. I have a spinning wheel and can’t spin on it much anymore, because my knees and hips dislocate almost immediately. I switched to supported spinning primarily, but an electric wheel would be a good substitute as well. Electric wheels are great if you want to make more yarn faster, but can’t afford a spinning wheel or don’t have the space for them. They are also one of the more accessible tools for those with severe mobility impairments.

And there’s still more, although I can’t do a pitch for all of them xD. There’s Tahkli Spindles for spinning cotton, Navajo Spindles that are long thigh-spinning tools, Medieval Spindles that are easy to whittle replacements for if you break your spindle a lot, and even more beyond that. Many cultures have their own traditional spinning tool, each with their own techniques and strengths, and if drop spindles aren’t doing it for you but you still want to spin, I implore you to check out other kinds of spindles !

From Sheep To Sweater (Washing and Processing A Raw Fleece)

Most people learn to spin from roving (even if it might not be a very good beginner’s preparation), although there’s also rolags, batts, top (both commercial and hand combed), sliver, and cloud. But what if you could start with a raw fleece (unwashed, with vegetable matter and lanolin and who knows what else) and make things out of that ?

There’s some immediate advantages to starting with a raw fleece (even over a washed fleece). For one, raw fleeces tend to sell very cheap. This will depend on where you live, but the vast majority of fiber that I buy these days is raw fleece, and I’ve never spent less on fiber. At a fiber festival, I once paid $10 USD for 2 pounds (slightly under 1 kilo) of raw Shetland fleece. So--they’re cheap. As soon as someone starts putting work into a fleece, like washing it or dyeing it, the price immediately jumps.

Second, if you’re looking for the most bang for your buck, starting from a raw fleece is the way to go. You need to wash it, skirt it (take out the really terrible or gross bits), perhaps sort or grade it if it’s multicolored or there’s clear variation in fiber quality, dye it (if desired--I only dye my white fleeces, as I quite like brown and gray and black), process it into spinnable fiber, spin it, ply it, and then knit/crochet/nalbind/weave/do whatever else your heart desires with it. A single raw fleece can last me a month even if I work on it tirelessly, and I might have paid $20 USD--a little over an hour of wages for me.

It also brings you a lot closer to your work. I can’t say I felt very attached to my fiber when I worked exclusively with roving, but sorting through a pile of hand washed Southdown Babydoll locks while I comb them into top to spin into sock yarn on supported spindles that I whittled myself--I can tell you, I feel pretty damn connected to my work, to the ridiculous little sheep whose wool I have, to my socks, and to the wool itself. It adds a lot of depth, both to the experience, and to my understanding.

It’s also honestly pretty easy. To wash a fleece, you need a dedicated wool pot (as in, don’t cook in it again), a bit of dish soap, and some time. Put the fleece in--don’t crowd it, just work in batches if your pot can’t easily fit all of the fleece--add cold water and a squirt of dish soap, and let it cook on the stove for about 45 minutes, without a lid. Don’t let it boil--ideally it should be steaming but not quite simmering. You can use a dedicated wool spoon/tongs to gently and infrequently stir the wool. The water should get pretty gross. After 45 minutes, start the tap running (you need to rinse the wool in very hot water--if you let temperature shock happen, it could felt), drain the water, and rinse the fleece. Then repeat--filling up the pot with hot water now--until the water stops looking dirty at the end of the 45 minute cooking time. Rinse it one more time, and then let your wool dry, ideally on a clothesline but over a vent/spread out flat on a towel is fine too.

Yes, it really is that easy. If you’re worried about felting or otherwise ruining the entire fleece, you can always start by washing just a handful, so that way if you ruin it there’s not much waste. But I’ve washed at least a couple dozen fleeces that exact way, and I’ve never ruined one.

After washing and drying your fleece, you need to prepare it. I typically prepare enough to spin for a day at a time, but you could also do it all at once if that’s more your style. There’s many ways to prepare wool, and I’ll discuss most of them at least in brief, but we’ll start with teasing. This is where you take a lock in your hands, and tease it open. Let any VM (vegetable matter) fall out or pick it out yourself, and open the lock up to the point that you can no longer see any lock structure. It’s now spinnable, just like that ! This is a pretty slow method, but if you start out your raw fleece journey buying just a few ounces/50ish grams of fleece, it’s perfectly doable to tease it all open by hand.

If you have money to put into the endeavor, a humble pair of hand cards (70 TPI will card most wools), or you can kind of make do with two pet brushes like these (although at that point, spend $10 USD more and you have a pair of hand cards, so idk what the point of that is, unless you already have them) is a very good place to start. Load the fiber onto one card, card it until it’s uniform, roll it into a rolag, and it’s spinnable !

You also have hand combs, which are a lot more expensive than hand cards, but which can process very long fibers and can get out all the vm. Cards don’t remove a lot of vm, so combs is the way to go for super vm-y fleeces. They also produce hand combed top, which spins up into a very compact, strong, and abrasion resistant yarn--great for socks.

Past that are drum carders, which are machines in the way that spinning wheels are machines--manual, but they certainly automate the processing of fiber for you. These can be expensive indeed, but process fiber very quickly and are a great choice if you plan to sell the fiber, if you want to start with raw fleece but haven’t the dexterity to do it by hand (and there are electric drum carders as well--otherwise, you are turning a hand crank), or if you want to process high volumes of fiber because you just go through it that fast.

Honorable mentions include flick carding (both cheaper and slower than hand cards--you work with a couple locks at a time and open them up by flicking them with a tined brush), blending boards (these don’t process raw fiber, but they turn already processed fiber into batts--so you can blend many wools very easily for different textures or colors. These are like painting with wool--so fun !), and willowing (I haven’t tried this one yet, but you lay out your wool and repeatedly hit it with willow branches or other bendy sticks, which opens the fiber and also sends it flying all over the place. It looks very fun, and rather slow, and is also free as long as you can find a willow tree).

This website describes some of those methods (and one I didn’t get to) if you’d like to check it out.

Colors to Dye For

Wool takes dye very readily, and you probably come into contact with several natural dye materials every day--onion skins, avocado pit and peel, daffodils, coffee, black tea, thyme, even grass ! You don’t have to be working with fleece to dye it (although dyeing fleece gives you so much color variation and is very fun)--you can also dye roving very easily. Batts, rolags, and top less easily, although it’s possible with a lot of care.

For most natural dyes, you need to collect quite a lot of it, and then let it cook overnight on low heat. Boiling (sometimes even simmering) can kill the color, so you’ve got to be patient. Crock pots on low or medium are great for this. If you can cook it two days, all the better. Let it sit and cool for at least 12 hours, then strain it. (Tip: you can store natural dyes in jars in cool, dark places for at least a year without any ill effects--so you don’t need to use the dye immediately)

The majority of dyes need something called a mordant (I go into more detail about mordants in this post if you’re interested). There are many mordants, but some easy household ones are alum, baking soda (bicarb), copper (put a few bits of copper pipe in a jug of white wine vinegar, let sit for a few weeks at least before using), or iron (same as copper, but with rusty nails. Use a plastic jug !!! Metal will rust and glass can break). Most people mordant their wool by putting it in their dedicated wool pot with some water, adding the mordant, and letting it cook on low for an hour. Then drain the water and add the dye.

Natural dyes need to cook for a while to set--I usually let them cook overnight at least.

For batts, rolags, and top, you can do something called solar dyeing--carefully mordant your wool as usual, then place it in a jar with the dye, and put the dye outside in the sun. Over time (at least a week--often months, especially if you don’t live somewhere warm and sunny) the heat from the sun will warm the water and dye the wool. You could also try storing the jar somewhere you know will be warm, such as near the stove or fireplace.

You don’t have to use natural dyes either--there are also acid dyes, or food coloring, kool-aid (sugar-free), etc. I’m a lot less familiar with those, so I can’t go on at length. They can be a good choice if you don’t have the time for natural dyes, or if you want to get specific colors and not guess what your wool will turn out as. Look into them if you have any interest !

Dyeing your own wool is immensely satisfying, and can be a very cheap (or free, in the case of many natural dyes if you’ve collected or grown them yourself) way of obtaining more color, if you find that you keep ending up with a lot of white wool.

Endless Breeds of Sheep

There are many breeds of sheep on there (not endless, sorry--although there will always be new breeds being developed, so endless in a way !), and they all have different qualities, both in terms of the sheep themselves, and the wool they produce.

Do you want your wool to be very hard wearing ? Down breeds such as Southdown (one of my absolute favorites), Shropshire, or Dorset can be quite durable, and are resistant to felting. You could also go for stronger, coarser wools such as Jacob or Romney--coarser means stronger with wool, and softer tends to mean weaker.

Do you yearn for a softer wool ? Cormo is fantastically soft, as are Rambouillet, Debouillet, and Merino. Many lambswools (meaning the fleece from a lamb--the older a sheep gets, the coarser its wool tends to be) can be softer than their breed standard, so seeking out lambswools even from breeds like Jacob or Rya (both usually strong wools) can lead to soft fleeces.

Of course, there are more considerations than just soft and hard wearing, but there’s pretty much a breed for everything. If you’re interested, “The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook” by Carol Ekarius and Deborah Robson is an incredible resource, and covers just about every breed under the sun (with pictures, samples, notes, recommendations, and interesting bits of history), as well as most non-sheep fiber producing animals as well ! Speaking of...

There’s Not Just Wool

There’s also many non-sheep fibers, and plant fibers too !

Animals with easily usable fiber include: alpaca, llama, angora rabbits, goats, camels, musk ox, and more ! Their properties are usually different from wool--all of the fibers from the animals above have little to no crimp in their fiber, meaning that they aren’t elastic like wool is. They’re also varying degrees of warm (cashmere--the undercoat fibers that come from many different breeds of goats--are extremely warm, but still not as warm as musk ox down), and some are unbelievably soft. If you can, I highly recommend getting a little cashmere, a little camel down, or whatever other exotic fiber strikes your fancy. They’re very fun to experiment with, and small amounts can easily be worked into projects to add warmth, drape, or softness.

We can’t forget about silk, either--produced mainly by certain species of silkworms, although most insects undergoing complete metamorphosis produce silk of varying quality as well. Silk is a very interested fiber to spin--but it can also be reeled instead of spun, which is how you can get extremely thin silk pieces without even needing to spin thread-weight yarn.

But in early human history, before we domesticated sheep and bred them to have better wool than they started out with, we spun things like inner tree bark, flax, nettle, and cotton. These all require very different techniques than wool, but most of them can be spun on the same tools (and all but cotton can be hand twisted into cordage instead, if that’s more up your alley). They are also inherently cooling--fabrics made from linen will keep you very cool indeed--so if you live somewhere hot where having wool objects is mostly pointless, don’t despair ! There’s still stuff for you to spin.

Connect With Others !

I’m about done with this monograph, but there’s a few last things I want to share.

First is the existence of Fiber Festivals--you may or may not have some in your area. They’re extremely fun, and you can meet many spinners there. They’re also usually a very cheap source of fiber, as prices are often a lot lower at festivals.

Second is the existence of Spinning Guilds--again, you may or may not have one locally, but if you do, you might want to join ! There are also spinning clubs and groups, which might be a little lower-key and more welcoming to beginners.

Then there’s TDF, or Tour De Fleece. You may have heard of the biking tournament called Tour de France which happens in July--well, every year a lot of us spinners do a tournament ourselves, but it’s generally not competitive (except on Ravelry--there are teams and points and everything). For the most part, participating in TDF just means setting a spinning goal for yourself from July 1st to July 23rd (the end of the race) and then trying to achieve it. For a lot of people, this means spinning every day. Some set goals like “get through this whole fleece I bought 10 years ago” or “spin a sweater’s worth of yarn” or “learn how to spin flax, finally” (that’s what I did last year). Or maybe it is just spinning every day--even if just for 20 minutes. On tumblr you can see other’s work and post your own under the tag #TourDeFleece2023, or #TDF2023 (there’s many variants as well)--we’d love to have you !

Lastly, there’s International Spin In Public Day ! To be honest, nobody can really agree on what day that is--allegedly, it’s the 3rd Saturday of September. (For me, it’s literally every day that I leave my house, but I digress). But I’ve also seen posters for October, for September 10th or earlier, and just generally lots of different dates. I’d say play it safe--if you see someone say it’s International Spin in Public Day, go spin in public just in case :D. The purpose of a day like this is to bring spinning back into public knowledge--let’s face it, most people in the western world have zero clue how yarn is made, and couldn’t differentiate a spindle from a spatula. This sucks ! Spinning is such a great activity--it can be meditative, calming, fun, exciting, or a background motion to other activities that allows you to actually pay attention (if you have ADHD). And I think a lot more people would spin, and would enjoy it, if only they were exposed to the idea. You certainly don’t have to act as Spinning’s public outreach officer, or anything like that... but when people ask what you’re doing, explaining it patiently and encouraging them to look into it does everyone a favor.

In Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful and not too confusing ! It’s really important to note that I’m just one guy--I don’t know everything, and I might not always have the best techniques. Looking for information on spinning from multiple sources is a good way to get a well-rounded understanding, and to correct common misconceptions that you might have already learned. Perhaps more importantly, there’s pretty much an infinite number of ways to do almost every single step I’ve described here, and if the way I showed you--or the video I linked to showed you--isn’t working, don’t despair ! There’s nothing wrong with you, you probably just need to do it a different way. I must have watched 3 dozen videos of people drop spindling before it finally clicked with me.

I hope I’ve opened up the world of spinning to you at least somewhat ! There are many things I didn’t touch on, and lots of stuff I wish I could talk more about, but at the end of the day I mostly wanted to 1) show you how to make yarn and 2) pique your curiosity about the whole rest of it. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them (Purple, I will of course answer all your questions and also attempt to mind read your questions before you’ve even asked them so that I have a 10 million slide power point done by the time the question is out of your mouth), but check the comments and replies first ! Someone else might have answered it already.

Thanks for reading, and happy spinning !

Fig J: The author holding his old drop spindle, spinning at a doctor’s appointment. The spindle now belongs to the friend for which this monstrosity of a tutorial was written ! :D

[viciousewe]

Me: Oh I’m so TIRED of dark red why don’t I shake things up by spinning some bright red!

[mothmiso]

(1) (2) (3) (4) by bluebird87

[springlock-suits]

William and Springbonnie are like Sleeping Beauty and the spindle, do you get what I mean with this

[senadimell]

Oh, the euphoria of a new skill...I’m finally starting to get the hang of spinning and I get such a thrill of happiness thinking about it. I’m looking over at my little spindle and the single I wound last night to ply today and I’m thinking “I made that! Me!”

It’s such a nice feeling, especially because I kinda resented spinning a few skeins ago because it was really hard and my yarn was so wonky until somehow something just clicked in how I was holding it and now I have so much more control than I used to.

[paleangellex]

Made with a blending board and a dream. Don't know the content, I just randomly bought 1oz chunks from a booth at Sheep and Wool. I can't wait to see it plyed.

[bangaveragewhitewine]

Hearts are wild creatures

Dad!Steve Harrington x Mom!Reader

Halloween, 1999

A simple worn-before couple’s costume and drinks with friends. Kissing like teenagers and hushed voices. You and Steve, a night to make up for lost time before Halloween-morning with your two little girls.

Takes place two years after soft slow, morning glow

Word count: 6.4k

Contents: Parent!Steve & Reader. Explicit (18+) - oral (f!receiving), p-in-v sex (reader is on birth control, but wrap it up, friends!). Breeding kink. Parental domesticity - Steve & Reader have two kids, mention of a difficult pregnancy, sickeningly sweet domestic fluff.

Author’s note: This started as soft Halloween-flavoured domesticity and then I imagined Steve dressed as Johnny Castle… we couldn’t not go there. 

Thank you @specialagentmonkey for proofreading and being wonderful. And for watching ST from the start with me! And thank YOU, dear reader, for being here. I hope you enjoy it!

Tucked away in the Chicago suburbs, your little house matches its companions in the cosy cul de sac; the residents of Elm Crescent had transformed their homes and gardens into a Halloween Wonderland as exciting for the adults as it was for the kids. You knew you had made the right choice buying your first home here. 

The garden has been prepared for a night of costumed trick-or-treaters, the path flanked by two homemade sheet-ghosts and leaves raked in vain leaving the green lawn clear for those that fell since yesterday afternoon. Four carved pumpkins guard the house from their spot on the front steps, arranged from largest to littlest - one for each of you.

Inside, tissue-paper ghosties with wobbly marker-drawn smiles made by tiny hands float on lengths of thread, seasonal art projects take pride of place in the kitchen, and paper bats guard the stairs from their hanging place on the spindles. Nothing too scary to frighten a four and nearly-two-year-old, all brightly childish orange and purple and green, smiling instead of scaring. 

Halloween fell perfectly in ‘99 - a Sunday night for tricks and treats meant that you and Steve could make grown-up plans on Saturday. A simple worn-before couple’s costume, a competent and willing babysitter, and drinks with friends in a too-loud bar that you all left early to get pizza and a cab home. It was later than you had stayed up or out in months, maybe years, and you both felt almost giddy with excitement. Far from the late and boozy Halloween nights of your early years as a couple, it was exactly the night you and Steve had wanted. 

Back home, your Johnny and Baby costumes were barely folded before you crawled into bed together and kissed like off-the-leash teenagers, keeping your voices and giggles low while your babies slumbered peacefully down the hall. 

After paying the babysitter from across the street, making sure she got home safe, neither you nor Steve could resist a peek at the two sleeping girls when you got home, both sentimental (and a little broody again) as you held each other gazing at their little dreaming faces. Beth with her bunny-teddy pillowing her cheek (reminding you to wash it soon with lavender detergent and steaming hot water) and Ava, sweet little Ava, starfishing in her crib. Your tiny girl takes up so much space in your hearts, pulls attention in every room she enters with her big brown eyes and honey-blonde hair; she is your little cherub. 

You had missed them on your night out, tried not to count the minutes since you had left or until you got home to them. Steve had felt the same, but you knew they were safe and (hopefully) sleeping. So, you tried and succeeded in letting yourselves be distracted by your brilliant little group of friends, strong drinks and each other - all of which came easily, with warm cheeks and loud laughter, stolen kisses while your friends pretended to take offence that you loved each other more than them. 

Now, at home in your cosy little bedroom, Steve’s hand skates upward, feeling the dips and curves of your body as your lips lock in a needy kiss. Smiling against your mouth, he greedily swallows the soft noise pulled from your throat. His hand finds its home, cupping your breast through soft shell-pink satin, as the other holds your hand pinned to the sunshine-coloured cotton sheet.

Two kids later and he is still utterly obsessed with you, in love with all of you - especially the bumps and marks of motherhood that came with each perfect girl. You had spent most of the night tucked to his side, pretty pink contrasting his tight black shirt and jeans. Robin had tried to sit between you at one point and you had been hauled onto the warm sturdy throne of Steve’s lap, his chin on your shoulder as he argued with his best friend over whether they should do karaoke or shots next. Except for quests to the bar for more drinks and a few trips to the bathroom, you hadn’t been without his warm touch since you left the house. He would have held your hand while you peed if he could, would have accompanied you to the bar except your friends forced you to be apart ‘for five fuckin’ minutes, dude.’

His lips skate lower, abandoning your kiss-swollen lips to nibble your jaw and seek out that spot on your neck while his thumb presses firmly against your nipple. Your brow creases in pleasure when he finds it; the quiet gasp ‘Steve’ is whispered into his hair, edging toward a whimper. 

“Mmhm? M’here, baby.” Tipsy from a lower alcohol tolerance and drunk on you, Steve’s voice is hot against your neck. 

Your fingers wrap over his own as he presses you into the mattress, his black Calvin Klein’s straining with need, with want. Your own underwear have been damp since his hand settled on your thigh in the cab at the start of the night. 

Your fingers slide into Steve’s hair, directing him back to your lips as his thigh slots snugly into the apex of your spread legs. 

“Yeah? There?” he murmurs, smiling cockily.

It had been far too long since you had time alone like this; too tired after work or parenting, one or both of you needed to dry tears and check for monsters after a bad dream just as hands began to wander beneath the covers. 

Your hips roll, electrified, grinding on the firm bulk of his thigh. “Please, Stevie…” 

You both know you could get off like this and if he thought that was what you really wanted - what you needed - Steve would let you. He would gladly watch you come undone, guide your hips and be whatever you need him to be. But neither had forgotten your hot whisper against his ear as Eddie carried a tray of drinks and shots back to your table earlier; the way your lips grazed Steve’s neck as you so quietly asked him to fuck you into the mattress when you got home. 

You had watched his eyes blow wide and pressed a rose-pink kiss to his cheek (warm and blushing) while your friends placed bets on when Baby Harrington the Third would be coming. 

Steve peels himself back, kneeling on the bed as he palms himself at the sight of you. You feel saliva pool under your tongue as you rake your eyes from his thighs, over that substantial bulge, and up his furry chest. He is nothing short of breathtaking, and Steve thinks just the same of you. 

Your fingers slip over the nude lace of your underwear, biting your lip when you brush over the damp spot visible even in the low light from the bedside lamp. You don’t play long, already too worked up, and push your panties down toward your thighs with a lift of your hips. 

Steve takes over, like a baton-pass, and eases your legs up against his chest with your feet against his shoulder. Your underwear is slipped off and thrown carelessly behind him, somewhere on the floor. He presses kisses to your calf, a curving path up over your ankle and the top of your foot before each leg is laid down gently on either side of his spread knees. 

You prop yourself up on your elbows before pushing yourself up to sit and meet Steve for another kiss; it is smiling and sweet and a little dirty. Your fingers hook into his waistband before taking a greedy handful of his unfairly pert behind, making him laugh against your mouth. 

“You going to give me what I want?” you murmur, kissing his chin. Your other hand slips down the front side, fingers wrapping around to squeeze his hard length as you look up through your lashes. 

“Anything. Everything.” Steve’s eyes flutter closed and he cups your cheek in one huge hand, blindly bringing you back in for another kiss. 

Your voices are just loud enough for each other to hear in the golden glow of your bedroom. You miss the days when you could be loud, but wouldn’t change it - take a day trip to the past perhaps, when you didn’t have to restrain your desire to a quick fuck after dark, or during nap time while the washer and dryer run in the background like white noise,

Maybe in a few weeks, before the craziness of the holidays, you can stow away to a hotel for a night or two and cash in on the babysitting offer from Aunties Robin and Nancy. 

But tonight is perfect nonetheless. It’s perfect when you shove Steve’s briefs down his thighs and when his fingers skate over your back to undo your bra (before it joins your underwear and his on the floor). You lay back, taking Steve with you, and hook your leg over his hip and bring him as close as you can all over again. 

All there is right now is you and Steve. You’re well-practised enough to be quiet. 

Covetous hands palm over hips, fingers thread into hair, pulling each other close and closer still. Steve finds his home between your thighs and leans over, dipping to kiss you as his fingers press and tease, push inside you with care. His fingers stretch just right and curl up to seek out the place that makes you drool. 

“Lemme have a little taste?” he asks against your mouth, smiling when a whine catches in your throat. “Yeah? Can I?” 

“So greedy.” Your cheeks are warm and crease when his smile sets you off. 

“I am. I can’t get enough of you.” His straight white teeth nip your lower lip, a bite he soothes with his tongue. “I think you love it…” 

You gasp as his fingers curl again before he withdraws them, and watch as he licks your wetness from them. 

Steve winks as his lips trail lips lower, over your chest and the softness of your tummy, your hips and the places on your thighs that jiggle a little bit. Steve presses a feathery kiss to your swollen bud before licking out his tongue to part your lips

Steve’s prone to getting sidetracked down there - not that you would ever complain about your husband who loves to go down on you - but you have been thinking of being railed by him since last Wednesday. 

The begged-for ‘little taste�� quickly becomes so much more.

There’s nothing ‘little’ about Steve - not his hands or his thighs, his biceps or his manhood, or his heart. His appetite for you certainly is not little or lacking either. With his hand on your thigh, the other on the cheek of your ass, he makes your thighs tremble with a few skilful licks and the soft suck of his mouth. His nose rests and nudges against the pudge of your mound, darkened eyes fixed on you as he flicks his tongue.

He watches how your jaw drops, the crease in between your brows. You feel dizzy, anchored only by the weight of his hand spreading your thigh higher, wider for him. 

The burning want in your belly flames hot and bright as Steve buries his face between your thighs. His tongue presses firm and flat, encouraged when your fingers slide into his hair to keep him ‘right there, oh!’ 

Silenced by your own hand, you feel that white-hot tight-winding feeling as his fingers slide home again. The sound of his wet mouth on you sounds so loud, the same volume as the throb of your heart, the blood rushing in your ears. A whimper of Steve’s name is stifled, a high choked-up noise in your throat as his scalp burns from tugging fingers. 

Your orgasm takes you by surprise, amped up and tightly wound after a night of teasing and wanting, and the long groping make-out and grind in the kitchen after the babysitter left.

Steve’s solid weight keeps your hips low to the bed, even when your back arches sharply.  An expert at your pleasure now, seeking it out and making you see stars every time, he keeps up the pace and pressure, with his fingers and tongue. He knows what you need, how you like it - never stale, never disappointing. 

Your body attempts to curl up on itself, feeling too good. Slowly, carefully, Steve drags his mouth to kiss your shaky thigh before making his way back to lie alongside you. His damp fingers, wrap around his diamond-hard length to give some sort of relief. 

Glowing and giggly, you gaze up at him and drag Steve in for a kiss. “Knew you were a greedy boy.” Your voice is quietly breathy, shaking with that post-orgasm wobble as he laughs against your mouth. 

“Got carried away. Sue me.” His voice is a low murmur. 

Cupping his cheek, you skate your thumb along the bone. He’s so gorgeous, gold-toned in the nighttime light. Your fingertips brush the moles on his cheek as Steve kisses you again; beneath the musk of you on his tongue, you can still taste the lingering whiskey notes from your night out.

Pulled right up against him, you feel the hard and soft of Steve’s body, the fur of his chest and thighs. He found two grey hairs on his chest earlier in the year which almost caused an existential crisis - only solved with your tweezers and a tonne of kisses and promises that you would still adore him when every hair on his body was shiny silver. 

“You wanna be on your back or front?” he asks, squeezing your side.

The question makes that inferno in your tummy begin to burn hotter again. You think of how good it feels when he’s behind you, thighs slapping against the back of your own, the way he stretches you and hits that place deep inside. And yet, you need to see him tonight - you are so dreamily in love with him that not having his lips on yours might just make you expire. 

“Back. Pass me that cushion?” 

As you get comfy, Steve takes himself in hand again and settles himself between your legs. His non-busy hand runs through his hair - still a glorious mane into his thirties, despite a few shorter cuts over the years - and you are reminded of the pretty-boy you fell for almost a decade ago.

Steve catches you smiling and palms your leg as you settle on either side of his hips. He matches the little grin and dips forward to kiss you, nuzzling your noses together. 

“What’s got you smilin’ like that, huh?” he asks, running the head of his cock through your wetness before tapping it at the top. 

He watches your lashes flutter, the way you bite your lip. 

“Just thinkin’ about you, handsome,” you murmur, “You always make me smile.” 

He grins and kisses you again, both feeling like young loves again despite the aches and pains and the mortgage and the two kids sleeping down the hall. “I fuckin’ love you,” Steve whispers. 

“I love you,” you murmur back, running your fingers into your love’s hair as the other hand grabs his wrist. “Please? Been waiting all night, Stevie…”

His lips melt the put-on pout and together you guide him inside. The stretch of him has got easier over the years, well practised at love-making and fucking like rabbits alike. He’s gentle when he needs to be, rougher when you both want it like that. 

“I’ve got you, baby. Sorry for making my girl wait,” he murmurs as he slides all the way in.

Eyes fluttering closed at the stretch-and-fill, Steve starts off with a slow grind that makes your jaw drop. He murmurs quiet swears at how warm-wet you feel around him, squeezing him tight as his hips draw halfway back before going all the way in again. 

“Fuck,” he whispers, and braces one hand by your head with the other splayed wide on your side. Your hips lift with him, legs propped high to open you up wider for him. 

For a scant second, you want to ask if his back hurts - he pulled something at basketball drills last week and you had massaged on Tiger Balm morning and night for a few days until the twinging stopped. The hard flick of his hips makes the question vanish from your mind, his cock dragging and hitting just right. 

“Oh god,” you whisper-gasp, jaw hanging open.

“I know, baby. M’sorry it’s been so long. M’a bad husband, huh? Leaving my poor wife needy and un-fucked.” His voice is hot and rough against your cheek, breath tickling your ear as he finds his rhythm. “Gonna make it up to you, yeah?” 

You squeeze the back of his neck, giggling. “Make it up to me all you want.” He palms over your hip, hiking it higher before leaning over you again. “Fuck, Steve. Feels so good.”

Your eyes dip to the gold chain hanging around his neck, watching how it sways in rhythm to how he’s fucking you. You bring your hand to where it rests against his neck, guiding Steve’s mouth to yours again. His breath huffs hot against your lips, tongues sliding in a dirty kiss. 

The wet click of parting lips sounds loud in Steve’s ears when you break away, moaning his name against his chin when his thrusts hit deeper, harder. 

“Shhh, I know you wanna be loud, sweetheart. I know you feel good.” His voice is like lava dripping as he kisses your neck. 

You pinch your lips together, the moan caught in your throat comes out as a high hum. 

Steve is so hard. His pants felt too tight all night; half hard since he saw you in your little pink dress. It only got worse, harder not to ask you to meet him in the bathroom, when you sat on his lap and toyed with the back of his hair, whispered in his ear before slipping into conversation with Nancy about something totally different. 

The slick-tight-hot feeling, the way you pulse around his cock, makes that tense coil of pleasure low in his gut wind tighter. His chest feels like 

You can’t help but fall a little more in love with him, hypnotised by the swinging gold chain, the circles he rubs against your hip and the way his styled hair falls over his forehead.

Squeezing your thighs around him, you bring your legs up and tilt your hips higher. Steve adjusts the stance of his knees and slows his thrusts to a deep grind, the tip of him brushing your cervix. You can feel all of him pressed right up against you, inside and out. 

“Oh fuck.. fuck, Steve.” Your voice is thin and strained, like a thread about to snap. 

“Yeah, baby. I’ve got you,” he whispers, biting down on his own lower lip. “God, you’re so pretty. So sexy.” 

The air in your bedroom feels humid and heavy, like a thunderstorm, waiting for lightning to crack and split the sky, waiting for a downpour. 

Steve moves his hand from your hip, gliding over your pelvis to feel how he makes you bulge just a bit before his fingers begin circling your sticky-damp clit. Just quick enough, firm enough, mean enough. 

Your back arches, quiet voice babbling with incoherence at how intense it feels. “I’mgonnacomeohgodstevestevefuck…”

“Come on baby, come for me. Let me feel it,” he pants, hitting deep and hard. He’s so close, barely holding on to himself. 

You hold him tight to you as you come, fingers tugging in his hair as the other hand claws and digs into the meat at the top of his ass. 

Overwhelmed, a sweet shock of release hits you like lightning and opens the floodgates. 

Steve holds you just as close, anchored to each other. Whispering hot words of praise against your mouth, he gazes into your watery eyes sparkling with tears - he makes you feel that good. 

“Oh baby, I’ve got you. You okay?” he asks, so tender. He leans over you, wrapping his arm beneath your lower back as the other braces his weight along his forearm. One huge hand cups your face and wipes your tears. There’s mascara smudged beneath your eyes, and you look beautiful. 

There’s that smile he loves; wobbly and lovely. A giggle-sob bubbles from those sweet kiss-bitten lips. “Fuck, Steve..” 

“I know, sweetheart. I know. Want me to pull out, is it too much?” 

You shake your head against the duvet, your hair a mess. “No, no. Don’t... Wanna feel you.” Your voice is slurred, love drunk. 

That makes him throb. He kisses you again and runs his nose along yours. “M’close,” he whispers, beginning a slow-dragging thrust inside your soaked and still-fluttering body. 

You can see it, how close he is, and feel it in how his rhythm has faltered. His brows pinch, smearing wet kisses to your shoulder as he tucks his face into your neck. 

“I’ve got you, Stevie. You’re so good,” you whisper, stroking the back of his neck. “Let go, baby. I’ve got you.” 

A grunting groan is smothered against your shoulder as Steve stills and shudders on top of you. His hips pump slow and hard as he comes inside with your name on his lips, making you shiver too. 

His weight settles, sinking you into the mattress in the best way. This is exactly what you had missed so much. As much as you fervently adore actually having sex with Steve Harrington, there is something so special about lying with him in the afterglow. 

Sweat-sticky and breathless, you stroke through his hair and press your lips into his hair. The hairspray scent lingers, clinging to the scent of shampoo beneath the smoke from cigarettes bummed from his bad-influence-best-friend Eddie. There was something about the smoke-tinged kisses that made you feel extra feral for him on the way home. 

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” you whisper, laughing softly when his sigh tickles your neck. 

“But you’re so comfortable.” 

Lifting his head, Steve smiles all pink-cheeked and dozy. “So beautiful too,” he murmurs, inching forward to kiss you. 

The wet noise from below makes you both laugh like teenagers and you take your turn to hide your face. 

“You take your birth control today?” he asked, easing himself up and out of you slowly, carefully. His eyes can’t look away from where he drips from you. 

“Mhm. Sorry, big boy.” You grab a tissue from the bedside table, wiping yourself gently before you mess up the duvet cover. You had both agreed, after having Ava, to wait a few years before adding to your nest again - it had been Steve’s idea after your less-than-easy second pregnancy. For a man with a bit of a breeding kink and a dream of a family the size of a field hockey team, he was wonderfully considerate. 

He kisses you again before standing to find his pyjama pants; he leaves out one of his sweaters and a pair of shorts for you too - sleeping naked was a dangerous game with two small kids. 

Clean-faced and exhausted and happy, you curl up together in bed after a few sleepy kisses and a playful argument about who would get up with Ava in the morning. As if Steve would ever miss a chance to let you sleep and steal the morning smiles from your youngest all for himself.

“You won’t even hear me sneak. M’a ninja,” he murmurs tiredly against the back of your neck and you can feel his smile. 

“If you say so, ninja boy,” you mumble back, dragging your joined hands up for one more kiss before slipping into a deep, peaceful slumber.

Sunday. Halloween. The best day of the year for your little girls - since the last best day (their Daddy’s birthday in late July). 

Ever a fan of Halloween, and autumn in general, you always wanted to bring your girls up to be excited for Halloween as soon as September began. Still so little, with Play-Dough minds, they had begun to catch on to your excitement and followed soaked it up. Beth especially, four with an expansive imagination, was excited about dressing up and eating candy and watching “Hogus Pogus” with you after dinner. 

Your parental body clocks ring at seven despite the late night. 

You wake to Steve creeping out, blindly bumping into the dresser with a quiet ‘shit’ as Ava calls out for him. This morning his presence was required to brush fat tears from the little one’s pink cheeks and kiss the damp paths they left behind until she was smiling again. 

You hear the youngest babbling as Steve carries her quietly downstairs, hoping she won’t wake you or Beth. The throb of a minor hangover and post-sex ache drags you back under the covers and into a light doze. 

You have another thirty minutes and some change until Beth wakes and realises she misses you, deciding to sneak in before even letting her Dad know she was awake - she wanted to see you hear about your Halloween party with her uncle and aunties and remind you that the best day had finally arrived.

The creaky hinge on the door alerts you - a reminder to ask Steve to show you how to oil it properly this time - you peek an eye open to watch the four-year-old sneak over to stand by the bed on her Dad’s side. She would be content enough with just seeing you, comforted in the knowledge that you were home to spend the day together; her face lights up when she spies you peeking over Steve’s pillow, your hand raised in a little wave. 

“Hi Mommy,” she whispers, dimples showing her delight. 

“Hi Bethie,” you whisper back, beckoning her into Steve’s vacant spot next to you. 

You open the covers to let your big girl in. She folds herself into you for a hug, her head against your chest. 

“I missed you. I missed you sooooo much,” she says, face turned up to look at you like she is a sunflower and you’re the sun. 

“I missed you too, baby.” Her little face cupped in one hand, you press kisses to her forehead and cheeks, her little nose. 

You make a tent big enough for two beneath the covers, lying on your sides facing each other until your giggling makes it too warm and your tummies rumble for the special Halloween breakfast you promise. (You curse yourself a little for that last glass of wine, trying to remember what exactly you had promised until Beth reminds you about the pumpkin-shaped pancakes). 

Wrapped in your soft dressing gown, you follow Beth down the stairs, hearing Ava’s happy-baby babble in the kitchen as she eats her half-banana breakfast appetizer. The decorations look a little silly and rough around the edges in the morning light, but still, your little home feels like a perfect pocket of happiness.

Beth jumps into the kitchen with an excited-but-not-very-spooky ‘BOO!’ for Steve. 

When she sees him, nursing coffee and Advil with a messy bedhead and tired smile, he quickly becomes Beth’s golden light source as her beaming face turns to him. 

“Woah! You scared me!” he says, clutching his heart before dipping to scoop her up. 

You try not to laugh at his Dad-groan and the cracking crunch of his knees as he stands, instead shuffling in your slippers to Ava in her highchair. 

Her hands bash on the tray, smushing banana with fierce excitement as you peck kisses all over her pretty cherubic face. 

Beth leans her head against Steve, playing with the string of his hastily thrown-on hoodie as she tells him about the dream she had and how he has to take lots of pictures of her costume later to send to your extended family. 

Spotting his bare feet on the kitchen tiles, you slip into the laundry room to find a pair of socks for him to wear. Resistant to ‘old man slippers’, you tuck them into his front pocket as you peck his lips and move him and Beth away from the counter so you can start on breakfast. You steal a sip of his coffee, wrinkling your nose at the lack of sweetness before shooing him and Beth to sit with Ava at the table. 

“What was Uncle Teddy dressed as?” Beth asks, head against Steve’s chest so she looks at him upside down. 

“He was a vampire. But he just wore his normal clothes and some silly teeth.” Steve rolled his eyes dramatically - he had seen vampire Eddie all the way back in high school when he was dealing instead of drinking, and again when you all used to drink and party the night away in your early twenties. Yeah you had dressed as Baby and Johnny before, but you had all boo’ed at Eddie when he showed up in the ultimate low-effort costume. 

“Oh. Okay. Vampires is sca’wry though, Daddy!” Beth reminds him. “You and Mommy didn’t go as scar'wies. What about Bobin?” 

You laugh quietly at the nickname Robin has had since Beth started speaking, and her simple way of humbling Steve about his own costume (and yours). 

“Robin dressed up as Elton John. You know the song you like, Benny & the Jets? She dressed up as the guy who sings that song. And Can You Feel The Love Tonight. He sings that too.” Steve is a wee bit distracted, nibbling the chunk of crushed banana offered from Ava’s fist.

“Bobin was Simba?” Beth’s eyes are wide, excited. She doesn’t seem bothered about her lack of scary costume, only yours.

“No babe. Elton John, he’s a singer. She had big glasses on and a sparkly jacket. You know he sings... Um. ‘Rocketmaaan, burning up his fuel out there alone..’ you like that one. I’ll find the tape later.”

Ava squeals in delight when he sings, so Steve indulges her a little more.

As you mix up pancake batter (adding a little food colouring to make them orange like pumpkins), and take two Advil for the dull throb in your head, the soundtrack of Beth and Steve’s conversation makes you smile, interspersed with Ava’s chirpy shouts for attention, her little contributions to the conversation. 

You glance back at the little tableau of Beth on Steve’s lap, his hood pulled over his messy hair (a pair of sunglasses and he would look just the same as your hungover mornings in your first apartment together). His spare hand strokes Ava’s hair, twirling the crushed baby-curls at the back of her head and tickling her chin and neck to make her giggle. 

Beth joins you after a little while, standing on a chair to help mix the batter and supervise your pancake-making with little bits of commentary. 

“That one looks a w’ittle bit squished, Mommy. Daddy can have that one.” 

“Thanks, Beth.” Steve’s voice is muffled behind his second cup of coffee. 

“Welcome Daddy! Mommy, can I has that nice stuff on?” 

“On what, sweets?”

“My pancakes.” You can hear her eye roll, the implied ‘duh, mom’ (thanks Auntie Max). 

“The nice stuff? Syrup?” 

“Yeah! Sir-yup.”

“Yeah okay. A little bit.” You flip another pancake, turning the chocolate chip face down onto the heated pan. “Do you want bacon on the same plate or on the side?”

“Um. Can I dip it?” 

“In the syrup?” 

“Yeah, in that nice stuff.”

“Yeah, you can try dipping it. Who taught you that?”

“Teddy.”

You smirk, “Steve, did you hear that? Betty’s taking after her Uncle’s eating habits.” 

“Which one?” 

“Ed. She’s gonna dip her bacon in syrup.” 

“That’s my girl.”

Beth giggles and turns carefully on the chair to look at him. “No Daddy, you does it all over! You got to dip-dip.” 

“Can you show me how?” Steve asks, he smiles over at her, looking so handsome with the baby standing in his lap now. 

“Magic word?” 

You snort-laugh, tucking your chin to your chest as your shoulders shake; you just about slide the pancake onto a plate without incident. Beth has one hand on her hip, a mini-Steve for sure, giving as good as she gets.

“Are you practising your magic for later?”

“Nooo Daddy. You has to say p’weeeeeeze-uhhh.”

“Okay-uhhhh. Please, pretty princess Bethany, can you show me how to dip my bacon in syrup?”

Bethany considers it and looks at you with a cheeky smile. “Yep! I show you, Daddy!”

You wink at her before helping her pour more batter onto the hot buttered pan, praising her careful steady hand. 

“Beth, can you grab a bib for Ava please?” You’re almost done and know you’ll get it served up quicker if your helper has a special task. 

“Yes! What colour?” her hot cocoa eyes shine with delight to help as you help her down. 

“Surprise me. We have a Halloweeny one for later, so any one you like for breakfast time okay? Dealer’s choice.” You dot a kiss to her head before watching her scurry to check what colour her sister's sleep-suit is. 

“There’s a laundry basket in the living room, babe. The bibs are on top. Do you need help?” Steve asks her, lifting Ava back into her chair before going to get forks and plates and glasses of juice for the table. 

“No tank you.”

You lean back against Steve’s warm chest and tilt your head for a kiss. “Hi. I missed you.” 

“Missed you more,” he murmurs, squeezing the tender spots on your hips as he kisses you slowly and sweetly. A proper kiss for the morning, tasting of coffee and shared banana and sneaked chocolate chips. 

Your fingers brush his jaw, feeling stubble beneath soft fingertips. He won’t shave today, you hope he’ll string it out a couple of days into the work week. 

After another hip-squeeze, he picks out cutlery and you notice how he squints into the drawer. 

“Glasses.”

“Getting them next, chef.”

“No, your glasses Stevie. You’ll get a headache.” 

“I have a headache. I’m blaming Rob for it.”

“It’ll get worse if you don’t put your glasses on, babe.”

You watch him mimicking your correctness with a scrunched nose as he picks out forks and knives. He knows you’re right but he doesn’t have to like it.

Steve gathers everything for breakfast, including Beth’s syrup. 

“I’ll get them in a sec,” he murmurs behind you, waiting for Beth to return with a bib first. 

You smile to yourself and start plating up. 

“Beth, how are we doing on the bib?”

When he looks into the living room, Steve sees Beth with every clean bib around her as she decides. 

“I can’t find one to match!” Beth’s face is a scowl.

“Babe, it doesn’t need to match. Just pick. Please.” Steve tries to be patient. Ava is getting impatient without food or distractions in the kitchen and he hears you chatter to her to try and help. He’s usually good at the diffuse and distract technique, a pro after quasi-parenting more than half a dozen teenagers.

“Can we do a-a spooky one?”

“Um. Sure. This one is kinda autumny?” He holds up the orange and yellow floral one, tiny flowers and green leaves. 

“But Ava’s jammies is pink Daddy! It doesn’t go! It has to be spooky and match!” Beth’s voice turns whiney, a pout on her face. 

Steve pops his head back into the kitchen where Ava is entirely unimpressed with being ignored as you bring over the plates. “Beth would really like it if Ava could have a Halloween bib now, and if it matched her pjs too…”

You watch him suppressing an eye-roll, knowing it would just hurt his head. He looks exactly like Beth. 

“Um, check the laundry room? I left a couple out.” You peek around Steve and see Beth with all of the bibs around her. “Sorry, I should’ve just told her to check in there.” 

“No, it’s fine. Beth, pick those up please and come wash your hands.” 

Steve smooches Ava’s cheek as he passes and palms your side with a squeeze. He picks up a purple bib with bats and a white one with ghosts - he is hopeful that one will suit Beth’s specifications and taste.  He has this Dad thing down to a fine art.

The bigger girl has clean and almost dry hands, pyjama sleeves rolled up her arms by your gentle mom-touch. Her face splits into a grin when Steve presents the choices.

“Yes! The pur-pellll!” she squeaks, bouncing on her feet. 

He dips to pick her up, barely suppressing the dad-groan - but it’s quieter than last time. “My little fashionista, huh? Everything’s gotta match?” He pecks her nose, making it scrunch like a bunny’s. 

When Ava’s got her bib on, distracted by cut-up pumpkin-shaped pancakes and berries (with one slice of bacon), Beth sits in her seat at the table in awe of the jack-o-lantern faces you have created. 

“Spooky enough, babe?” You sip maple-sweetened coffee and smile at her little happy face. 

Her hair is spilling over from her messy bedtime ponytail, which comes more loose as she nods furiously. “So cool! Tank you Mommy!”

“Super cool,” Steve agrees, winking at you across the table. “Thanks, baby.”

You’re just as sexy to him now, as you were last night with your messy hair and the well-loved teddy-print dressing gown. He notices his glasses case by his coffee and you wink back at him over the top of your mug.

With his world more in focus, Steve watches you smile at Ava as she shows you her chunk of pancake. You kiss her cheek, nuzzle into her milk-and-honey scented neck telling her you love her. 

You feel like the littlest one hasn’t had your full attention this morning and you have missed her, feeling mom-guilt to the hilt. Steve will take on dish-duty once the plates are empty and bellies are full, giving you time with your girls. 

There are a few last-minute decorations and chores you want to make time for in between kid-friendly movies, dressing the girls in their costumes - Beth as a tiny cute witch and  Ava as a cosy pumpkin. The girls are your number one priority today, making core memories for them and taking one hundred and one photos for the albums. Ava is still too little to really soak it in but she takes enough notice to nourish her little mind. 

You and Steve will fill out the candy for trick-or-treaters, and hold little hands when the girls go door to door in your own cul de sac. When they’re tucked up in bed, you will pick through the candy leftovers and curl up to watch one scary film followed by a non-scary one as a balm before you sleep. 

For now, you sit back and share a loving smile with Steve, your socked feet brushing beneath the breakfast table. 

What a treat. 

Thank you for reading! Likes, reblogs and comments are absolutely adored and cherished ❤️ 

[goldenamaranthe-blog]

Jazzercise!: Hazbin Hotel

Buckle up, Buttercups! This one's long.

Charlie: (wearing a pair of pink leggings, rainbow sneakers, white exercise t-shirt, and a red sweatband around her head) Alright, Everyone! Today, we're going to be doing some team bonding exercises throoooough- Da-Dada-Daaaaaah! -Exercise!!!

Hazbins: (all groan in dismay and grumble and clamor in annoyance)

Angel: (wearing powder pink leg warmers and neon green leotard that looks like it came out of an 80s) Is there any way we can sit this out? Some of us are hungover.

Vaggie: (wearing a black and purple sports bra and black spandex shorts that cut off halfway down her thighs, hair tied up in a ponytail) Still? We celebrated the hotel's grand reopening last week.

Husker: (wearing your stereotypical gym teacher windbreaker pants but no shirt or jacket) The empty liquor wall at the bar will verify.

Lucifer: (magically appears wearing a pair of bright red, men's booty workout shorts from the 70s, white Dad sneakers with tall red socks, and a white and red sleeveless shirt tucked into the shorts) Well, I'm all for a little sweat and hard work! Whatcha got for us, kiddo?!

Charlie: Dad! (Averts her eyes) What are you wearing?!

Lucifer: What?! I wore this in my college days!

Angel: Oooooh! While I'm not complaining there, Short King, I don't think Charlie appreciates seeing the "King's Apple" lodged in your shorts.

Lucifer: Huh? (Looks down at the natural, indiscreet bulge in his shorts) ........But these shorts cup the boys so nicely.

Charlie: (about to puke like when she watched Angel's best porno during show and tell)

Vaggie: Babe, let's just focus on getting the workout done. Alright?

Charlie: OoOookay.... Um... Do you mind taking over? I actually have no idea what I'm doing.

Vaggie: (sparkle in her eye) Sure thing, babe. (Turns to the rest and squares her shoulders) Alright, we are going to start with two easy laps around the track followed by partner bear crawls for two hundred meters, thirty burpies, and ending with twenty inverted push-ups! Any questions?

Hazbins: (awkwardly glance at each other)

Niffty: (wearing a 50s style one piece workout suit) YAY!!! PAIN!!!

Vaggie: THEN MOVE!!!

-One Hour Later-

Hazbins: (moaning and groaning in agony as they lay defeated on the track)

Angel: (rolled out like a spider that got run over) Charlie..... Toots.....

Charlie: (gasping for breath as she falls to her knees and holds herself up on shaking arms) Yeah.... Angel?

Angel: (Looks over to Vaggie who is on her third iteration of bear crawls and using an equally dead Lucifer for weight) If this psychopathic bitch of a stamina monster brings this kind of energy to the bedroom, (wheezes and coughs) then I'll pray for your loins the next time you guys have sex.

Charlie: (panting as she rolls onto her back, too tired to even correct the inappropriate statement) Thank you, Angel. (Tilts her head up and leans on her elbows to watch Vaggie)

Vaggie: (finishes the bear crawls and drops Lucifer off with a jump) Thanks for being my partner, Sir. (Breaks into her burpees)

Lucifer: (wheezes through little spindles of smoke) No problem, Vaggie. Anytime. (To Charlie) What do you feed that girl?

Charlie: (watching Vaggie intently with a fresh blush not caused by exertion)

Angel: Charlie?

Charlie: (watches the muscles in Vaggie's thighs and shoulders work as she speeds through her burpees)

Lucifer: Chaaaaarlie? (Snaps fingers) Little Duckie, are you alright?

Charlie: (hearts beat in her eyes and Careless Whispers plays in the background somewhere as she watches Vaggie's leg, shoulder, and back muscles contract and flex under the duress)

Vaggie: (finishes her burpees and goes into a handstand, briefly getting her balance before starting her handstand push-ups)

Charlie: (watches a bead of sweat follow the contours of Vaggie's shoulder muscles and scars and drool starts dribbling down her chin) Angel.... I need that prayer now....

Angel: Huh? (Follows Charlie'sline of sight and groans in pain as he brings his hands up in prayer) Our Unholy Father of Debauchery, please see that this horny bitch's snatch makes it safely out of the upcoming pounding she is about to receive. May her holes be elastic and well lubricated to avoid tearing, her legs be flexible as they reach behind her head, her orgasms shake her very foundation, and the aftercare be filled with all the cutsey cuddling she can handle. Amen.

Charlie: (continues watching) I wanna climb her.

Lucifer: (awkwardly) Uhhhhh.... Vaggie's not a tree, sweetie.

Charlie: I want her to *CENSORED* my *CENSORED* and *BEEEP BEEEP BEEEEEEEEP* while *CENSORED*,and then *BEEEEEEEEEEEP* and *CENSORED*

Angel: (gasps and clutches his imaginary pearls) Holy Fuck, Babe!!! Cool your jets! (Pulls out his phone and starts recording) I gotta use some of these lines at the next recording!

Charlie: When she smacks my *BEEEEP*, I want to *CENSORED* *BEEEP BEEP* and *BEEEEP-EP-EP-BEEEEEEEP* to taste *CENSORED*.

Lucifer: (faints after hearing his daughter saying such filth)

Angel: (stops recording) ......Fucking-A, Charlie, that's even making me feel dirty.....

Thank you, @sevi-fuk, for giving me the idea of Charlie going fiendish about Vaggie and her muscles.

[dadsbongos]

cult activity

1.6 k words / warnings - exhibitionism, men... touching u, oral + fingering (reader receiving), coercion ?

summary - you join your roommate to his sermon with Suguru Geto, and you get singled out as the one non-believer.

@toxycodone / kinktober: day one - exhibitionism

~~~

Natural sunlight flits through the wooden window sill. Bowed heads in neat, even rows stretch before you toward the raised sage mat. A mere half-step higher, but the man standing on it seems to command the room effortlessly. You kneel in the very back with your roommate, whose eyes are closed and hands folded in their lap. He nods slowly to the leader’s words. Your eyes trail from your roommate to the black-haired priest, only to find the man already looking your way.

Shoulders jumping toward your ears, air startles in your throat and chokes you. Gaze darting away, your chin clacks down into your collarbones in an awkward attempt to avoid his dark stare. Despite the pouring sun, his eyes don’t shine or sparkle beneath light as if he somehow avoids it. 

When you shyly flutter back up to see if he’s abandoned examining you.

He has not.

Addressing the room, the priest’s voice is as lulling as it is clear. Not once does he waiver or stumble, even when you’ve reconnected eye contact his words are concise. Encouraging. 

“Take my hand,” he says cooly, “Experience enlightenment with the rest of us. Live without suffering.”

He raises both hands, long fingers spindling your way as he hones on your gaping, clueless stare. Your brows furrow -- is he seriously demanding audience participation? And from you, no less? You didn’t think religious types were really so zealot to try engaging the guests obviously disinterested. But no, he nods and smiles softly with long black hairs flowing into his face from the movement.

A surprised suspire jostles your attention, your roommate then elbowing your side with wide eyes, “You, you, he wants you to go up there…!”

You grumble quietly. He elbows you harder. 

“Go, go,” practically shoving you up from the floor, your roommate eagerly watches you hesitantly approach.

All eyes drift toward you in the middle of the cramped service room. You come down the center unsurely, knees wobbly and palms sweaty, regardless of how happily the priest beckons you forward. He smiles kindly, fingertips scraping your biceps once you’re finally before him, his palms sear into you through your sleeves. Thumbs tenderly brushing along the round of your bone. 

Up close you can catch the faint purple discoloration beneath his eyes, dark lines scrunching beneath his long lashes. Rose lips crackled by the cupid’s bow with frown lines beginning to carve the soft pale plane of his face. Despite it all, the man grins with lidded eyes and soft hands that slowly squeeze.

“What’s ailing you lately?” his deep voice makes you jump out of your concentration. 

“Uh,” brows furrowing, you blanch and throw an unsure glance over your shoulder toward your roommate. He watches intensely, hands spread by his knees on the floor, knuckles whitening in his grip. Nothing about his face tells you what an appropriate response could be, so you settle on something bland, “School…?”

“School,” he nods, “College, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. That’s what I thought,” he murmurs, spinning you by the shoulder to face his clergy and petting down your arms. His warm hands seem to rejuvenate you, whole body lightening and electrifying until your spine is pin straight. He chuckles quietly, “Better?”

“Yeah!”

“You’re so heavy with the burden of living, aren’t you?” he purrs, fingertips grazing back up your arms until his palms are curving along the nape of your neck. Hands curling intimately around your throat and pressing just enough for you to memorize the impression of his digits, “Down and drowning all by yourself,” his voice dips lower, fingers tightening just barely, “Lately you’ve been dreaming of being strangled.”

“They have!” your roommate barks, amazed, hands now hovering over his hanging jaw, “I’ve heard the screams, and the stories! Every night, it’s the same dream.”

A strange nausea swells in you as the priest’s hands quickly fall to your shoulders, clenching hard. His voice is tight, words clipped, “I’m sure.”

The nausea eases when he steps into sight. He smiles, still.

“Are you ashamed of sex?” he wonders aloud, a practiced raise of his brow following. You let out an uneven hum of confusion mixed with disbelief, and instead of repeating himself he suddenly lays two fingers against the waistband of your shorts.

His nails slice just barely against the skin beneath, but your protests die behind clenched teeth as he soothes,

“Sex is natural for primitives, it’s your greatest joy,” he assures, yanking the band of your bottoms sharply and thumbing the cold silver button, “For as stupid as people are, they’re smart enough to engage in sex for pleasure as well as procreation. It’s what you’re made for.”

Dark eyes fall to the fleshy exposure of your thighs, then back up to your face. The priest isn’t smiling anymore, teeth having caught his bottom lip and lashes batting against flushed cheeks.

“I want to see it,” he dips index and middle finger into your shorts, dragging them down until he can see the plain fabric of your un

erwear. Then, louder, he says, “I’m going to see it.”

Sparing you no cursory glance, his other hand joins in pulling your little shorts down. His knees bend until they’re pressing into the floor, like the countless men behind him -- all watching with hot faces and frantic eyes. 

Suddenly, as if remembering them at the same time you do, he announces, “I’m going to expel your shame.”

The earnesty shocks you, he fumbles for the next word like he’s not sure what he’s saying before it comes out. Like he’s convincing himself at the same time.

Your shorts hit the floor, he jerks your feet out from each hole before hurriedly returning to your crotch. Eyes crossing to the final barrier from your groin, the priest bruises your hips in pause. Uneven breaths visible even beneath the thick layers of his robes. All cool and calm is now missing from his face, lips parted to release stuttered gasps and cheeks reddening down his neck. Long black hairs fraying and sticking to warm skin. It feels like you shouldn’t be seeing him this way; intimately kneeling and peeling down your most private garment. Barely a second of the teasing slowness passes before he rips you bare.

As if rays of gold and rainbows and butterflies flow from between your thighs, he gasps softly and clutches the backs of your legs; digging shallow crescents into the softness. Peeking up at you through wetting, long lashes, the priest murmurs only to himself. You catch marbly, mashed ‘m’ sounds and venomous swears and you choose not to ask, afraid nobody in the service hears him.

“Release your embarrassments,” he presses into the tender skin above your knee, sealing the command with a kiss before moving up your right thigh and skimming up your left with a firm hand. Massaging the fatty inside and plying it for fun, “Enjoy absolute pleasure.”

Hot breaths fan your exposed hole. 

Spreading your legs to parallel his broad shoulders, the priest bows forward to lay the first broad stroke of his tongue. Immediately after, he’s compelled to lave another. Warm and soft, the buds of his pink tongue savor every fold while he curls both arms around your legs. Left hand burning his prints into your skin as the right prods around your sweltering hole. 

Gasping at the abrupt stimulation, both your hands fly to the man’s long silky hair mussing up the neat half-bun. He moans when you tug the tresses and shakes his head to dig deeper between your thighs. 

A soft gasp distracts you from the eager licking, your head twitches up to find rows of men. Leering. Downset brows, tongues prodding between drying lips, and furious hands working over bulges and popping jean buttons. Your roommate’s gaze glued toward his savior’s head sucking syrupy wetness like you could heal all his worries. 

The priest moans into you, your taste hot in his mouth, and he craves more. His grip on your left thigh suddenly pushes you forward until you’re bucking on his flattened tongue. Fucking the pretty face beneath you, you watch him between watering eyes with a blistering face. Pants for more mumble into the room, spurring the clergy to lean in en masse.

“Louder for me,” he whispers, blinking up at you in a haze, “Or I’ll stop.”

So you huff and tease your right knee against his shoulder, too scared to fully throw it over, “More, please?”

He laughs at your crackled voice, nipping your hip, “Good puppy.”

Before you can rouse yourself from ecstasy and question the title, he’s sinking back into you. Middle and ring finger caressing -teasing- around your hole before slinking inside. Crooking to prod the button that’ll make you squeal and hump his nose like a pathetic welp. 

He fucking loves it.

How frantically your hips jump against his plump, soaked lips. How the monkeys behind him are groaning and mewling while palming hard cocks beneath their pants. 

How you whimper unintelligible garbage when you start creaming on his tongue.

You heave for breath, a scream burdening the back of your throat as Suguru pulls great relief with every thrust of his fingers -- each shockwave making you feel lighter than the last. Softening under his ministrations until you’re so pliant, you’re letting him lay you down in the middle of the congregation.

Men lean over you with sweat-slick mugs, eyes raking your exposed skin and unsteady hands teasing to lift your shirt. Strangely, you don’t twitch into action even as your roommate presses drooly kisses along your temple.

But Suguru’s favorite part of delivering mass is when the monkeys give into primality.

[city-of-ladies]

"Mycenaean women put their own spindles to splendid use, producing luscious cloaks and long, richly patterned or striped skirts. Far from resigning themselves to the weaving rooms, they travelled in chariots, performed songs or poetry to the accompaniment of lyres, and carried wheatsheaves for public ceremonies and rituals, as vibrantly coloured frescoes from the palace at Mycenae reveal. In one of the most enigmatic paintings, one woman holds a sword, another a spear, while two tiny men, one painted red and the other black, float mysteriously between them, like toy models or thought bubbles. Through their contact with the divine, perhaps, the women pictured gain agency over the men’s fate. Hera, Zeus, Poseidon and a female birth and death goddess known as Potnia were among the deities the Mycenaeans are known to have worshipped. While Mycenaean women clearly played an important role in religion, their political position within the palaces was weaker than that of their Minoan counterparts, and secondary to the men’s. Each Mycenaean palace complex was presided over by a male ‘wa-na-ka’ or wanax.

Surviving clay writing tablets provide just as fascinating an insight into the lives of women in the real palaces of the Mycenaean era. The fullest collection of tablets comes from a pair of rooms in the palace complex of Pylos, but Knossos, the former Minoan capital, was also a key repository. A total of 4,476 tablets have been preserved across the two sites. Among these there are references to more than 2,000 different women. Unlike Linear A, the Minoans’ writing system, the Mycenaeans’ similarly syllabic Linear B has been successfully deciphered. Working (as opposed to non-working elite) women were denoted by signs resembling an abstract impression of the female form. ‘Woman’ was conveyed by two dots for breasts, legs joined to suggest a long skirt of the kind Mycenaean women wore, and a curved line where her head would be, suggestive of long or dressed hair (in the sign for a man, by contrast, there is a straight line for the head).

The women referred to in the tablets were employed in a wide range of jobs, many of them familiar from the Homeric epics. In the Odyssey, women grind wheat and barley, ‘the marrow of men’, at mills. There were ‘flour-grinders’ at the palace in Pylos. In both epics, women weave, whether royal or servile. Andromache works in the Trojan palace with a loom and distaff while ordering her servant women about their work. Helen embroiders a purple cloth with scenes from the Trojan War as if she were telling the story of the poem herself. And as we have seen, Penelope weaves and unweaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. The women who wove at Pylos and Knossos were no less versatile in their handiwork. They managed something like a textile industry, producing goods for export as well as the palace community, and worked in groups according to specialism. There were wool-spinners and carders, linen- and leather-workers, finishers and headband-makers for horses. These women usually worked separately from men, but at Pylos there is evidence that at least two women, Wordieia and Amphehia, formed part of a mixed leather-making group. 

Working groups were the modus operandi at the Mycenaean palaces. Women were usually accompanied by boys and girls, presumably their own children, as they went about their tasks. Many were divided also according to their geographical region. Pylos was split into sixteen districts over two provinces, Nearer and Further, separated by Mount Aigaleo. The palace-workers came from more than 200 named places, some of which may have been local streets, while others, including Lemnos, Miletus and Knidos, lay further afield. It is possible that, like the Sidonian (Phoenician) women carried to Troy by Paris in the Iliad to weave fine robes for the court, some of the women working in the Mycenaean palaces had been enslaved.

Although the women were engaged in hard, practical labour, their work was recognised as highly skilled, and the Mycenaeans took some pride in it. Men were sometimes described on tablets as being the offspring of women of particular crafts, for example, ‘sons of flax-workers’. Female workers were allocated the same amount of food in the regular distributions as their male counterparts, and twice as much as their children, whereas in Babylonia, men typically received three times the female ration.

A mysterious senior class of priestess at Pylos known as ‘keybearers’ (did they open and close shrines within the palace complex?) even owned land. A landowning keybearer named ka-pa-ti-ja (‘Karpathia’) was wealthy enough to donate almost 200 litres of grain to the palace, probably for a religious festival. Given the historical prominence of women at the court of Pylos, it is fitting that a mythical Pylian king should intervene in the dispute over Briseis in the Iliad. Old Nestor urges Agamemnon to return the woman to Achilles and to end their feud."

The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World, Daisy Dunn

[seabeck]

Purple spindles ii

[milkweedman]

Fiber Sale (need money for moving; also trying to destash) !! Only shipping to the US. All prices include shipping.

Would also really appreciate donations if you want to help support me but can't buy something for whatever reason.

Check the original post to see what's been sold and what hasn't (I will cross out sold items). First come first serve.

https://ko-fi.com/kolyenka

Prepared Fiber--all of this is prepared by me :) the following 4 are cheaper as I can ship them in normal envelopes

A: 0.14 oz, combed top. Blend of bfl, tencel, tussah silk, corriedale, merino. Very soft and shiny. $8.

B: 0.11 oz, combed top. Blend of tussah silk (black) and mohair locks (green). $8

C: 0.22 oz, combed top. Same blend as A, just a lot more of it and in different combos. Distinct gradient from one end to the other. $10

D: 0.4 oz, rolag (made on blending board). Tussah silk, mohair, and bfl. Very squishy and fine. $13

E: 0.29 oz. Rolag, wool and cotton blend. Even more stripes of color under the surface. $13

F: 0.51 oz. Rolag, wool blend with some Angelina. Purple underneath. $15

G: 4.75 ounces. Rolags (many many rolags). Blend of various wools; some fibers are not quite next to skin soft, but overall it's a soft blend. Mix of red, orange, white, purple, and black. $45

H: 1 ounce. Washed longwool fleece (breed unknown). Dyed by myself with onion skin. $10

I: 1.2 ounces. Southdown flax blend, predrafted from rolags. Could potentially make up to 6 ounces total of this. $18

FLEECE

J: 6 ounces. Washed jacob lambsfleece. Very soft for a jacob, large bits of vm (was able to get it out with hand cards). $20

K: 5.5 ounces. Hampshire with 2+ years growth, washed fleece. Definitely an odd fleece, not like your usual down breed. Has vm; washed it multiple times but still looks gross--I've found its almost impossible to get totally clean before it's yarn. Recommend combing, spinning, then washing. Nice and soft. $25

L: 7.5 ounces BFL cross. Very soft and with good luster. Some vm, was able to remove with hand cards. $25

M: 4.75 oz. Jacob x Border Leicester. Good luster, warm brown tips. Nicely soft. $20

SPINDLES:

1: thin spindle (7 inches long). Good for cobweb weight but can achieve thinner and thicker. Birch wood with woodburning. $80

2: thick spindle (7 inches long). Good for laceweight but can achieve thinner and thicker. Wood type unknown (some sort of fruit tree iirc). No woodburning due to lots of wormholes and spalting which provide their own visual interest (they don't cause problems spinning don't worry). $60

3: thick spindle (6.5 in long). Good for laceweight, can spin thicker and thinner. No clue on wood type. Woodburned on most of the surface, the rest has wormholes again. $90

BAGS

4: handblended handspun handknit drawstring project bag, 20 inch circumference. Cord is handspun flax. It's folded in half in the bigger picture. $90

5: handblended handspun handknit pouch. Don't remember the circumference but you can compare to the other bag. Body is entirely southdown babydoll wool. Handle is handspun icord. $75

HANDSPUN YARN

6: 4 oz, 325 yards. Hand blended and handspun. Alpaca, wool, silk, silk noil, angelina. 2 ply fingering weight. Very textured. $65

7: 5.75 oz, 572 yds. Merino and silk blend, 2 ply, dk weight. Blended for a triangle shawl, stripes get longer as you go. Very soft, shines very beautiful in the light. $115

Please DM if you're interested--first come first serve. I take payment via ko-fi.

[astra-ravana]

Working With Baba Yaga

The Bone Mother

Other names: Baba Jaga, Yegi Baba, Jaga Yagishna, Babaroga, Little Grandmother

Colors: White, black, green, purple, red

Herbs: Patchouli, birch, sandalwood, geranium, chaga, motherwort, sage, rosemary, holy basil (tulsi), lilac, clove, poppy, juniper, hemp, garlic, thistle, fern, nettle, aspen, mint, wormwood, spruce, mugwort, marshmallow, nightshade, trillium, tobacco, pokeweed, wheat, thyme, bergamot black rose

Crystals: Garnet, smokey quartz, tourmaline, amethyst, bloodstone, red jasper, stichtite, obsidian, nuummite, charoite, hematite, seraphinite, jade, phenacite, black moonstone, petrified wood, vivianite, iolite, aegerine, ruby, opal (especially black), spinel, emerald, peridot

Element: Water, Earth

Planet: The Moon, Saturn, Pluto

Zodiac: Cancer (Scorpio)

Metal: Iron, copper

Tarot: The Hermit, The High Priestess

Direction: North

Date: January 20th

Day: Saturday

Animals: Snakes, cats, chickens, foxes, crows

Domains: Hedge witchcraft, herbalism, baneful magick, astral travel, shadow work, cleansing/banishing, prosperity, abundance, necromancy, green/nature magick, healing, wildcrafting, foraging, advice, guidance

Offerings: Beeswax candles, bones, skulls, chicken feet, eggs, bread and salt, vodka, soil and stone, mortar and pestle, spindle and fiber, water, handmafe items, artwork of her house

Symbols:

[whencyclopedia]

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

In "The Fabric of Civilization," Virginia Postrel explores how the history of textiles is akin to the story of civilization as we know it. As evidenced throughout her book, Postrel treats each chapter as a standalone story of its production and journey, all the while masterfully weaving it together to show the story of human ingenuity. While academic in nature due to its incredibly well-researched methodology, the general reader will enjoy the book's unique style and approach to world history.

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Virginia Postrel expertly demonstrates how the history of textiles is the story of human progress. Although textiles have shaped society in many ways, their central role in the development of technology and impact on socio-economics have been exceedingly overlooked. Attempting to remedy this issue, Postrel organizes her book into two distinct sections: one focusing on the different stages of textile production (fiber, thread, cloth, and dye) and the other on the consumers, traders, and future innovators of said textiles. To strengthen her argument, Postrel pulls from different primary sources across many regions and cultures, such as the works of people like entomologist Agostino Bassi and the accounts of disgruntled Assyrian merchants. However, Postrel goes beyond relying solely on books and peer-reviewed articles; she personally interviewed textile historians, scientists, businesspeople, and artisans who offered their own insight regarding the importance of textiles in the world. To help the reader envision the intricacies of textile manufacturing, the book is riddled with images that range from ancient spindle whorls and Andean textile patterns to nineteenth-century pamphlets raging over improved cotton seeds. It is quite a laborious task to explain the history of textiles, but Postrel’s way of organizing her chapters and style of writing does an excellent job of conveying her argument.

In Chapter One, Postrel illustrates the many uses of fibers and how their multipurpose functionality served its role in world economies. From the domestication of cotton in the Americas to sericulture in ancient China, such fibers left an indelible mark on trade and technology. Chapter Two looks at the use of thread's connection with social and gender roles as Postrel argues that dismissing fabric as feminine domesticity ignores its integral role in the social innovations that products like clothing and sails provided. Chapter Three connects mathematics with weaving through handwoven textiles by Andean artisans and in the notations written down in Marx Ziegler’s manual, The Weaver’s Art and Tie-Up Book (1677). Chapter Four explains how dyes not only contributed to the distinction between social classes, such as the use of Tyrian purple by Roman emperors but also the ingenuity of humans to ascribe meaning and beauty to a variety of colors. Furthermore, the increasing and competitive trading of dyes in the 16th and 17th centuries would eventually contribute to the discovery of synthetic dyes.

Textile traders and consumers also helped to foster cultural exchanges. Postrel then highlights how traders often also served as innovators. The implementation of the Fibonacci sequence in European trading not only helped traders with bookkeeping but also gave a new perspective to the practicality of learning math by helping traders understand profits and calculate prices. Readers explore in Chapter Six how the Mongol Empire expanded across many different lands for their desire for valuable woven textiles. Under the Pax Mongolica, the textile trade flourished as the Mongols protected the Silk Road, resulting in cross-cultural and technological exchange between Europe and Asia. Lastly, in Chapter Seven, Postrel introduces synthetic polymers like nylon and polyester, where the efforts made by scientists like Wallace Carothers, Rex Whinfield, and James Dickson have revolutionized the use of textiles. Companies like Under Armour use polyester to create water-repellent clothing. Despite synthetic polymers currently being used innovatively, many still seek to look into the future of textiles. As Postrel explains, imagine your pockets can charge your phone or your hat could give you directions. The future of textiles is incredibly exciting.

As an avid writer of socio-economics, Postrel expertly showcases her knowledge of the subject. Postrel’s previous books, such as The Future and its Enemies (1998) and The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (2013), cover the interconnectedness between culture, technology, and the economy. Postrel has also worked as a columnist for several news sites, is the contributing editor for the magazine Works in Progress, and was a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. This book is a wonderful intellectual contribution that feels like a documentary series, perfectly threading the reader through cultures and regions like a needle through fabric.

Continue reading...

[huramuna]

beware the sapphire peak - chapter 1.

aemond targaryen x wife reader x alys rivers a period piece, set in 1902.

prev | next

wordcount: 2.6k

you're a young, american lady who is an aspiring author. you are wooed by a mysterious and charming savant from england. swept off your feet, you're whisked away to his family's ancient estate, Dragonstone Hall. but with all stories, secrets are hiding around every corner, and your suitor is no different. a crimson peak inspired mini series. (this will likely be about 3 parts)

@huramuna-fics - follow & turn on notifications for just my fic postings!

content: smut, angst, gaslighting, unhealthy relationships, manipulation, alys in her girlboss gatekeep gaslight era, no use of y/n, afab reader, pre-established alysmond, this isn't going where you think it is (it might be), infidelity-ish, polyamory

to death we dance - salem's heir • the flower duet - sabine devieilhe & marianne crebassa

“You were nearly late, miss,” one of the butlers murmured in your ear. “The music’s just started.” 

“There is a quote about being fashionably late, isn’t there?” you mused, taking his gloved hand as he helped you up the steps. 

It was a banquet for your father’s business, a celebration of having struck gold (oil) and turning a huge profit. Or, in your words, an excuse for the high and mighty to get plastered and dance the night away. Your fist clenched upon the train of your dress– a lovely evening gown in eggshell white, with hand embroidered lilacs and lavender petals on it, spindling up your bodice like a trellis. Your usually somewhat unruly hair was tamed into a braided and pinned up-do, with an expensive broach poked into the bun of hair in the shape of a falling wisteria branch. 

Your father was the first to greet you, peeling away from the gaggle of portly oil barons. He kissed your cheek. “You look lovely tonight, my dear. A vision in purple, I must say.”

You smiled back at him. “Yes, well, you all but wringed my arm to get me to attend– and you shall hold up your end of the bargain… right?” you hummed softly, batting your eyelashes. 

He let out a small sigh, nodding. “I will send your manuscript to the publisher– the editor in chief is here tonight, if you’d care to mingle. Amongst… many other eligible bachelors, I might add.” 

Your father had spent the better part of the last three years gently trying to pair you up with a suitor for marriage. He was a patient man, as he had droned on about so many times before, but his patience was waning. You were twenty-one years old, and apparently, that was a ghastly sight– to be twenty-one and unmarried with no promising prospects. 

Of course, you couldn’t care less. You were more focused on finishing your manuscript in that time– you had a knack for writing and reveled in works of fiction that tended to lean to the darker sides of things. It had finally reached a point you were somewhat happy with, and had convinced your father to chat up his well connected colleagues so you may be able to send the first draft to a publisher.

The price for that, however, was to entertain suitors. At a gala. Dressed and primped like a Thanksgiving turkey. It was all so dreary to you– the ladies stared at you and whispered, citing you as the dreary one. 

Breaking away from your father with a tiny smile, you began to mingle– as well as you could, anyhow. You were awkward and a bit sheltered and it showed. However, once you said who your father was, dollar signs would flash in the eyes of the men you were speaking with, and they would push forward in the conversation. You weren’t ugly by any means and could become a good wife to some young entrepreneur– but you didn’t want that.

You were about fed up with it all three hours later, your nails clinking against the glass of champagne you were nursing for the better part of thirty minutes. Your look of slight annoyance managed to stave off any other wanton suitors– until another man approached you. You had exchanged some glances with him during the night, but you didn’t recognize him. He was tall, exceedingly taller than any of the other men there. His blonde hair, so pale it was almost white in hue, was cinched at the nape of his neck in a clean ponytail, falling between his shoulder blades. He was in a custom-fitted three piece black and green suit– you could tell from how perfectly it was hugging him, in all the right places.

A familiar heat came to your cheeks as you watched him saunter over to you with an intent in his pale blue eyes– eye? One of them, you noted as he came closer, was slightly off-color from the other and moved a bit slower. Likely fake, you thought. The light casted over the planes of his face, chiseled as it was, illuminating the slightly raised, puckered skin near the fake eye in a distinctual scar. He looked just like the perfect inspiration for a protagonist in one of your novels– or mayhaps an antagonist. He seemed to skim the line between the two in appearance alone.

Curious.

“My lady,” he greeted as he finally broke the air of silence between you, his arms placed behind him in a very calculated manner. “Are you enjoying yourself this evening?” he asked then, a brow perked. His accent wasn’t American– that you knew for certain– likely something European. 

“As much as I can, sir,” you responded coolly, despite being caught slightly off guard by his sudden and overwhelming presence– a dark cloud in a perfectly tailored suit. “I hope that the…” you cleared your throat, trying to sound a little more confident than you likely were. “The… event is to your liking.” you mustered a smile, diverting your gaze to your champagne, hoping there may be the secrets to being a good conversationalist somewhere within the bubbles.

He chuckled, the sound low and husky. It caused a shiver to go up your spine. “The event is well and fine, my lady. Are you… the proprietor of the gala tonight? I wouldn’t expect a beautiful thing such as yourself to plan something like this.”

You glanced up at him beneath fettered lashes. He was complimenting you and insulting the party at the same time. “No– I am not. I’d never choose such… dreary musicians for an event like this. They’re playing for a wake rather than a party– that would be my father’s doing.” you slipped it into the conversation, that this was your father’s party, trying to gauge if this handsome stranger was after what all of the others were.

Surprisingly, his expression, smooth and cool with the barest hint of a smile perking at his naturally upturned lips, didn’t change. “Dreary,” he repeated, “Melancholic, gloomy, monotonous, vapid– all good words to describe the state of affairs.”

“You have quite the expansive vocabulary, Mister…” your voice trailed off, an inadvertent way to ask for his name.

“Targaryen– Aemond Targaryen. And you?” he reached his hand out to shake yours – how incredibly formal– as you returned your own name with a wide-eyed stare.

“Targaryen. As in… the ancient bloodline? Descended from dragons, close to royalty, Dragonstone estate Targaryen?” you asked, mouth slightly agape. From what you knew of them, they were as close to the height of English royalty, real royalty, as there was in the current year, 1902. Their wealth alone, minus all of the titles, made your father’s look like a pissant trust fund. 

“The very same. You’re familiar with my family?”

“Ehm– familiar, more so I’ve heard of you all. Your family’s name comes up quite often in my father’s social circles. And I am quite nosy.”

“And what do you think?”

“About… your family? Mr. Targaryen–” 

“Call me Aemond.”

“Aemond– I don’t really know much besides the height of your prestige– and your family’s estate, Dragonstone. My father brought me back some photographs of it from his trips over the pond. It’s quite beautiful.”

“Your father brought you pictures of our home?”

“N-not just yours! I collect photographs of old estates, mostly ones from Europe. I like to use them for inspiration for my… stories. I’m a writer– a novice, mostly.”

“A writer? Have you published anything I might know?” 

“Oh, God no–” you laughed, covering your face slightly with your hand. “I’ve not yet been published. I actually sent my manuscript to… or will be sending one to a publisher soon. Hopefully.”

“What do you like to write?” he asked then, leaning a bit closer to you as if he was actually enjoying conversing with you. “Romance? Children’s fables?” he teased softly, his one eye gleaming. He was quite handsome, you thought.

“I like horror– mysteries, gothic fiction. I’m quite enamored with the… macabre and weird,” you admit. “I hope that doesn’t frighten you.” 

Aemond grinned, his teeth shining, canines pronounced against his thin lips. “Oh, yes, it does frighten me. But, all good horror stories should frighten their readers, yes? I expect you’re a fan of Vampyre? Perhaps Dracula?” 

“Both are good. My favorite, however, is Frankenstein. Mary Shelley is a genius. The Castle of Otranto is also wonderful and the pioneer of the genre. I remember trying to read it when I was younger and being scared of the dark hallways at night. Later on in life, those dark hallways enthused me enough to write about them– hence my… fascination with old houses.”

“Old homes certainly do have their fair share of secrets, don’t they?” he paused, straightening his lapel slightly before leaning back in towards you. “And do you believe what they say? That Mary’s husband wrote it and published it under her name?”

Your brows knit together in slight irritation. “Of course not. Why would he need to do such a thing? I hope you don’t mind me saying, but men already have enough advantages as is– publishing under a woman’s name instead might be considered a disadvantage.”

“Will you be publishing under your own name?” 

You blinked, taking a sip from your champagne. It was something you considered and went back and forth upon. “I haven’t decided. I have a pseudonym ready just in case.”

“Do tell– so I know what name to look for on the shelves within a year.” 

God, was he ever charming– and without even trying, really. He was well-spoken with a voice that was soft and almost whispery. It made butterflies bubble in the pit of your stomach– now that was a feeling you weren’t familiar with. “Dorian Gray.”

“Cheeky woman.” he mused. “Fancy a dance, Miss Gray?”

“... I suppose I could be swayed.”

–

Your dance together, to say the least, was a success– it started month’s worth of courting after. Aemond took you on the most splendid nights out, wining and dining you like you were a gorgeous, interesting debutante. It was exhilarating to say the least and made you feel… truly wanted– especially since his family was exceedingly wealthy, your father’s wealth couldn’t have attracted him. 

He took you to the theater, out to wondrous restaurants, and bought you various gifts like jewelry, writing supplies and outfits to wear when you went out.

It all felt very much like a dream to you– something beyond your usual, weary routine that had hardly ever changed since your mother died when you were eight years old. You’d recused into yourself then, the dark hallways that scared you so fiercely just before her death now seemed welcoming. You thrived in the dark, like a moth. 

But now, you felt something more akin to a butterfly, bathing in the sun’s light. 

It wasn’t a great surprise when Aemond asked your father for his blessing to marry you. Your father, who had harped you for years to get married, was suddenly apprehensive. 

He pulled you aside, arm around you. “Do you like this boy, dear?”

“Y-yes, father– very much so.”

“I’ll be honest, sweetheart. I’m not exactly keen on letting my only daughter go off with… some man–” 

“He isn’t just some man, father! He’s a Targ–” 

“Don’t interrupt,” he chastised firmly. “I’ve had my people look into his family further– it’s a whole mess, issues with succession, backstabbing, incest, the whole nine yards,” he took a measured breath. “But I’ve heard nothing but good things about… Aemond. But… you’d be so far away. You’d be off living in the annals of England, a whole boat’s ride away.”

“This is what you wanted, father! For me to marry, for me to be happy! This is the happiest I’ve been in… so long. You must see that?”

The creases in your father’s forehead relaxed as he regarded you for a long moment, before turning to Aemond, who was waiting patiently off to the side. He let go of your shoulder and walked to your beau, staring at him sternly. “Will you treat her right? Give her everything she deserves and more?”

Aemond perked up slightly, rubbing the side of his forefinger with his thumb in a seemingly nervous gesture. “Of course, sir. I’ll give her everything I have and more. She will be regarded as a Lady– the Lady Targaryen of Dragonstone Hall, and she wouldn’t be treated with any less respect than a Lady deserves.”

Your father’s gaze narrowed, taking it all into careful thought. “... very well. You have my blessing, son. But, one whiff of even a tear from her eye on your account, and your nads are forfeit. I may not be as well-off as your family, but I’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places.”

– 

The marriage was a quick affair, as your father, and now Aemond, knew you had no patience for pomp and frills. Aemond gave you a beautiful ring with an absolutely gigantic sapphire inlaid in the center, citing it as a family heirloom from centuries past. Your father saw you off onto the boat, bawling his eyes out. You’d never seen your father cry– not once. 

As husband and wife, you both agreed to wait to celebrate your wedding night until you arrived in England at his family’s estate to your marital bed.

The trip overall was a little under a week’s time upon a luxurious liner, where you both enjoyed champagne and each other’s company. You craved your husband, and he craved you in the same, but you each wished to keep your agreement intact. But it was increasingly hard, as you held one another close each night and his need for you was clearly pressed to your lower back.

Dragonstone Hall was a few hours' carriage ride north of the port and was nestled upon a high-ridged cliff. It was as gorgeous as the pictures had depicted, even moreso. It was ancient, imposing against the skyline and mingling to the clouds, where sea birds and ravens alike swirled above the towering watch towers that were supported by stone walls with vines grasping to them like lifelines. 

It was gorgeous, gothic and most definitely haunted– a perfect place for a woman of horror such as yourself. 

Aemond helped you out of the carriage, a hand placed upon your waist as he guided you beyond the gates. Your eyes were wide with wonder, taking in the scenery like a breath of fresh air. Tears threatened to spill over suddenly, as you were just overwhelmed with everything going on. You were married to someone you loved, who loved you– and were the Lady Targaryen of Dragonstone Hall. 

“Something wrong, my love?” Aemond whispered into your ear, his lips tickling your lobe.

“N-no– I’m just… very happy.”

He wiped the tears away with the pad of his thumb, clearing your vision. You glanced up at one of the windows on the third story of the castle. Someone was staring back at you.

A lady. Her hair was red, her skin almost translucent. 

You must’ve been imagining it, surely. Looking to another window, another visage appeared.

Another– this time with dirty blonde hair, her blue eyes ghastly and bloodshot. She was practically see through. 

You pressed closer to Aemond, blinking profusely– it must’ve been the exhaustion from the nights on the boat catching up to you. Once you rubbed your eyes, you looked back; the figures were gone. 

As you approached the main door of the estate, another face caught your eye. 

Another woman– with dark hair and sullen, emerald eyes. They pierced through you like two heavy jewels, making goosebumps prickle atop your arms. She wasn’t ghastly or undeathly like the other two, and when you rubbed your eyes, she was still there.

She was still there, very much a living person in the flesh, with flowing blood and a beating heart. And she was beautiful.